CompleteMartialArts.com - Thirteen
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List Price: $15.00
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Manufacturer: Del Rey
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9780345480897
ISBN: 0345480899
Label: Del Rey
Manufacturer: Del Rey
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 560
Publication Date: 2008-06-24
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: 2008-06-24
Studio: Del Rey
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Editorial Reviews:
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The future isn’t what it used to be since Richard K. Morgan arrived on the scene. He unleashed Takeshi Kovacs–private eye, soldier of fortune, and all-purpose antihero–into the body-swapping, hard-boiled, urban jungle of tomorrow in Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, winning the Philip K. Dick Award in the process. In Market Forces, he launched corporate gladiator Chris Faulkner into the brave new business of war-for-profit. Now, in Thirteen, Morgan radically reshapes and recharges science fiction yet again, with a new and unforgettable hero in Carl Marsalis: hybrid, hired gun, and a man without a country . . . or a planet.
Marsalis is one of a new breed. Literally. Genetically engineered by the U.S. government to embody the naked aggression and primal survival skills that centuries of civilization have erased from humankind, Thirteens were intended to be the ultimate military fighting force. The project was scuttled, however, when a fearful public branded the supersoldiers dangerous mutants, dooming the Thirteens to forced exile on Earth’s distant, desolate Mars colony. But Marsalis found a way to slip back–and into a lucrative living as a bounty hunter and hit man before a police sting landed him in prison–a fate worse than Mars, and much more dangerous.
Luckily, his “enhanced” life also seems to be a charmed one. A new chance at freedom beckons, courtesy of the government. All Marsalis has to do is use his superior skills to bring in another fugitive. But this one is no common criminal. He’s another Thirteen–one who’s already shanghaied a space shuttle, butchered its crew, and left a trail of bodies in his wake on a bloody cross-country spree. And like his pursuer, he was bred to fight to the death. Still, there’s no question Marsalis will take the job. Though it will draw him deep into violence, treachery, corruption, and painful confrontation with himself, anything is better than remaining a prisoner. The real question is: can he remain sane–and alive–long enough to succeed?
From the Hardcover edition.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Show me, don't tell me
Comment: Very exciting premise here - in the not so distant future America has split along conservative and liberal lines into 2 separate countries and genetic experimentation has created a race of "super men" called 13's (genetic variation #13) who have either been locked up or exiled to the Mars colony. These guys are genetic throwbacks to the caveman and serious alpha males that used to run the tribes and groups of stone aged hunters. They were created to fight in wars but afterwards, were killed, locked up, or exiled.
Our protagonist (Carl) is a 13 who is licensed to track down rogue 13's and either capture or kill if need be. He is brought in to hunt down a particularly nasty 13 who escaped from mars, feasting off the frozen bodies off his shipmates on the months long haul from Mars to Earth. Yeah, wow, gritty. Morgan's strength is envisioning a world that is very very derived of our own - showing how technology can and will be abused.
But, then about half way thru the book, it stops cold. And as Carl and crew track down the vile 13, we suffer thru chapter after chapter of political and social rhetoric. I really don't like when authors stop the plot cold and start lecturing to me the details of a made of the social & political structure of a world set in the future. I could literally have skipped the middle 1/3 of the book to no effect. Some editor here was really asleep on the job.
I have read all of Morgan's books and this one just got too far off base. My advice, less preaching and more action and story. If I want to contemplate the social structure of emerging religious & political factions I'll click over to "that" section of Amazon and find something, thanks.
I'll give it a solid 3 as it starts strong & end strong.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Species Gap
Comment: "Thirteen" was originally published in Great Britain as "Black Man," because its protagonist is dark skinned. The decision by the book's American publisher to print the book with a different title than "Black Man" was undoubtedly wise, if somewhat disingenuous. Furthermore, this wisdom extended to the publisher's decision not to mention anywhere on the book's cover that its protagonist was black, and that one of the book's primary themes is that of race. The only hint for the prospective purchaser of the book that race is one of the novel's primary themes is found on the book's copyright page, wherein, buried in small print, the book's original title is mentioned.
The American publisher's decision to change the book's title for the American audience must have displeased Morgan, who is white, and who, in his dedication, credits his mother for teaching him to hate racism with "an unrelenting rage." The wisdom of the publisher's decision is confirmed by the fact that I would not have bought the book had the publisher not changed its title nor disguised the book's race theme. Having lived my entire life being bombarded with endless classroom lectures, books, magazine articles, essays, television shows, movies and conversations about the evil of racism, I get the point already. Racism is evil. It's a point that's obvious and easy to understand, and Morgan brings nothing new to the table. My point is that I don't even want to be sitting at that table, because I'm sick and tired of eating the meal that's being offered. It's not that the meal is necessarily unpalatable, it's just that it's getting a bit stale.
But since the publisher tricked me into paying $15 for the book, I read it. And I liked it, actually. It held my interest for all 540 pages. Morgan writes well, has interesting characters and some interesting ideas. I don't read much science fiction nowadays, but "Thirteen" was enjoyable.
And, as it turns out, Morgan's race theme is actually utterly dispensable to the novel's plot. In essence the story would be the same even if the protagonist (Marsalis) had been white. Thus, Morgan's American publisher was correct in changing the book's title from a focus on the protagonist's skin color ("Black Man") to his status as a genetically altered human ("Thirteen"). Marsalis' relationship witht he world is defined much more by the fact that he's a thirteen than by the fact that his skin is dark. Morgan knows this, of course: he even has one of his characters say, "'Well, it's not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned....More of a species gap.'" And that's exactly the real focus of the novel. Marsalis is not black inside, or white, but rather thirteen. Morgan is only ridiculous when he's talking about race, because rather than offering us some serious food for thought, he merely feeds us more of the same silly stereotypes that have become so common in "liberal guilt" fiction: Jesus-juiced, stupid, racist white villains and victimized, intelligent people of color. (Yawn). Morgan's novel would have been much better had he stayed away from the race stuff and stuck to the "species gap" issues--but I know, he can't help himself...as a child his mother fed him righteous anger, whereas mine fed me only warm milk and cookies.
But although the novel is annoyingly flawed in this one regard, I was ultimately able to ignore that flaw and enjoy the story. It's a little long and it's nothing to take too seriously, but it's entertaining.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My conclusion: Richard K. Morgan is a bigot
Comment: The story is OK. As written, it's far too long. It's a mystery without involving the reader enough so the reader can guess at the solution. It's an action story with long, ponderous descriptions breaking up the action. It's a story about people, but Richard Morgan seems unable to create a character that can evoke audience empathy. It's a science fiction story set in a world that's only mildly interesting -- it's missing the "gee wiz" technology that adds to most science fiction stories.
But the real problem is Mr Morgan's apparent bigotry against Christians and middle America. He calls it "Jesusland", which seems to be meant as a slur, but I don't think it's offensive, so no big deal. Jesusland and everything about it is always portrayed negatively. Every person from there is a racist and most use the N-word casually. Every Christian in the story is easily manipulated. Every mention of a "preacher" is negative. Morgan's Jesusland is universally backward.
Every other culture in the book -- and there are many -- is treated with understanding. Things don't work out good for everyone, but they're all "human" and each has a point of view. Not the Christians though. The genetically engineered killers have their reasons and their imperatives. The Muslims have their belief system and their reasons. But Morgan's Christians in Jesusland are just stupid. I can only conclude from this that Morgan is a bigot.
Don't buy this book. You're not missing much anyway. Life is too short to waste on mediocre entertainment. And bigotry should not be rewarded.
Customer Rating:
Summary: mediocre thriller
Comment: There used to be a time when I was able to read trough eight hundred page book, in a single day, never caring about the techniques used, clichés employed and other elements novel is consisted of. There used to be a time when story itself could be able to influence me so muchso that I couldn't let go of the book. As time went by, experience accumulated, bitching ability developed and SF&F worlds described on numerous pages somehow lost their magic. I began to see behind the barriers of word, started to look upon structure, see it's repetition, it's ideology, and with that started to resent many of the books which just repeated dominant pattern without single idea of there own. Thoughts of improving the genre, of developing one's own imagination within the boundaries of certain discourse where soo far away to some of the writers, so that reading became constant search for interesting voices in calamity of sounds.
I have first heard of Richard Morgan in some back-alley chat about Woken furies" when the author was characcterised as a overly-simplistic, machoistic, violent type without any relevant idead in the world of SF, or literature as such. I couldn't side with this kind of talk, especially since I haven't read the mentioned book, so I decided to to pick the Black man", praised somhere as astonishing or something else in a same sense. After finishing it, I could understand forementioned people.
That kind of negative talk seems as too much of a negative-hype, wihtout any arguments that would lie in background and hold it's place. But, one will need only half of the book to find the arguments for himself.
Black man" feels like those movies we all watched in some periods of our lives. There' a good guy, there's a bad guy, there's some kind of an evil plot which is a threat for society, there is shootingm ar chases and all kinds of similar thing which you don't need me to tell you about. Maybe this sounds appealing to some, but when it's written on more than 600 pages it feels like four hour long Dolph Lundgren movie.
World of Richard Morgan's Black man" is familiar mixture of near future variation of modernity, with complex society dominated by massive corporations and capitalistic economy. In a world of constant struggle, opressed clases and dominant poverty, everything is a battle - battle for existence. This setting offered much potential (though it's SF potential is rather low, it feels more like some kind of alternate history, future(?)) which is wasted too much with constant running around, long and banal (comic book from 60's) converstaions and strange put gnomin know-it-all sentences in a mouths of military and covert-ops professionals. Maybe it's a thing of a genre, and maybe ot's just a bad writing.
SF offers much more than Black man", and one could make a giant mistake of judging the whole genre by this book. When confronted with works of Delany, or Simmons or myriad of others, Morgan could only hide itiself and offer it's literature to those people who just want quick read on a plane flight, something to consume and forget as soon as possible. For others, who are looking for literature in books (and this may sound almost weird) - there is only one advice. Look somwhere else.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Can't call it spellbinding...
Comment: The only thing spellbinding about this book was that someone reviewed it as "spellbinding". Someone at the bindery must have accidently put the wrong cover on a Takeshi Kovacs novel for the reviewer.
To begin with the book is only a fair read. Some action, some sci-fi, nothing groundbreaking. I read it through, only finishing because I came three quarters through when it stalls out hopelessly. I am a fan of Morgan's earlier Kovacs novels. If you like those books then you will quickly realize that the tone is pretty similar minus the sleeving technology. The book goes off the rails when he starts painting the future in pretty simplistic political terms. Jesusland.. Really? The concept of the THIRTEEN is a good one but somewhere in the middle of the book there is a full blown seminar on Anthropological societal development that sounds like he wrote it right out of his research notebook when he got off the phone with whatever college professor he uses. Then there's Peru... The author must have wanted to vacation somewhere and write it off as work expense. The whole book is weak on plot. All the female characters are interchangeable. Same personality, same dialog just paper cut outs. BUT BY FAR the most unforgivable aspect is the main character is english... Say it with me English. Yet he is written with no location specific speech, vernacular cadence... nothing. He makes no real English references, has no cultural differences whatsoever. Of course none of the characters have except the ignorant southerners.
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