Thirteen
Richard K. Morgan
Del Rey Books
ISBN: 978-0-345-48525-0
2007
The future hasn't turned out the way we might hope. Technology has advanced as expected but we've not matured as a species and still do not know how to handle scientific advances responsibly.
Mankind has reached Mars but failed to make it the idyll we would like. Instead it is a world of hardship where people go on short-term contracts to earn quick money before returning to Earth. It's also the modern version of an island penal colony, a place to dump undesirables.
Genetic engineering is a fact of life, but instead of curing mankind's ills we've created sex slaves and killing machines. These killing machines, "Thirteens", were created to be perfect soldiers, atavistic human males; deliberate throwbacks to the distant past before the softening of civilisation. However when the warfare stopped, Thirteens were considered dangerous to their creators, and so were exiled to Mars.
Carl Marsalis is a Thirteen, one of the few remaining on Earth - a bounty hunter for the United Nations who tracks down and retrieves (or eliminates) rogue Thirteens left on Earth.
One Thirteen has managed to escape Mars, smuggled onto a transport ship, where he has treated the cryogenically suspended passengers as his own personal larder, leaving a truly grisly scene. Marsalis is recruited to the retrieval mission, one you know is going to be his toughest yet.
This is a big book - comfortably over 500 pages. That worried me. I've read few lengthy books that managed to maintain my interest to the end. Also it’s a dark vision of the future, where we've managed to get everything wrong.
Something in it, however, captivated me. Carl Marsalis is the violent man you'd expect. He does not feel compassion; he does not feel remorse. But somehow the author manages to make you empathise with him, possibly due to the total ruthlessness of the other Thirteen; possibly due to the reactions from people supposedly on Marsalis's side.
Morgan has populated this world with wonderfully flawed characters, with detailed back-stories, brought vividly to life. They feel real, their reactions and prejudices feel real, and each has a unique agenda. The world itself is a superbly realised future. The United States has split into three states, split along the religious/liberal divisions visible in today's America.
The violence is brutal; this is very definitely an adults-only book; nothing of the Thirteens' killing-machine natures is held back. But beyond the violence it is highly intelligent, not something I expected amongst all the gore. The plot is complex; the various threads will keep you wanting to turn the next page, even if it is an hour past when you intended to stop for the night.
-- I.E. Lester
