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    Thirteen
    Thirteen
    Thirteen
    Audiobook22 hours

    Thirteen

    Written by Richard K. Morgan

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen is near-future science fiction, very much in the vein of Bladerunner. A failed government program to produce a more violent, aggressive form of military fighter has resulted in the U.S. rounding up most of the test subjects and isolating them on Mars, a place where no one with any sense would wish to spend their days. But not all of the government subjects have been caught and shipped out to Mars. Enter Carl Marsalis, a hit man who would like nothing more than to stop killing and put his past behind him-and when he's eventually captured in Miami, it seems like the government might take care of his problems for him.

    Unfortunately, around the same time a transport from Mars arrives back on earth. The entire crew has been killed by a stowaway who turns out to be one of these violent superhumans-and maybe something worse. Now Marsalis is given a choice: use his heightened powers to hunt down the killer, or face a fate worse than death.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 17, 2007
    ISBN9781400174317
    Thirteen

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    Reviews for Thirteen

    4/5

    625 ratings35 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was a good book with lots of action, and the author did a really good job of tying up all the loose ends that many authors skip.
    • 4/5
      Macho rock-em-sock-ems are a guilty pleasure and Morgan delivers with eloquence and vision. Presque-future, science fiction freaks me out a bit but well-done! I have similar feelings about Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake although that one wasn't quite as action-packed, other than the apocalypse part! I should say that I loved Altered Carbon and eventually I read my way on over.
    • 4/5
      Adverb horror!! examples: skullishly, icily, breathily. no these are really used in this book. great story telling terrible writing.
    • 5/5
      I've read the Altered Carbon series so I thought I knew what to expect from this author. He really surprised me with this one. The dialog in this book was on a much different level, digging deep into philosophical areas which were interesting, avoiding the trap of preachiness. This one also made me care about the characters much more. There were tears...a rare occurrence. Bear with the first few chapters. It feels like too many characters and scenes but it focuses in after that and tells a very good story with unexpected twists (no pun intended).
    • 2/5
      Carl Marsalis seems like a lucky man. Thirty-odd years ago the US and UK created genetically modified soldiers, called "Thirteens", but when public horror shut the project down, the Thirteens were put into camps or shipped off to Mars. Carl is one of the few permitted to roam free--on the condition that he hunt down other Thirteens, who have left their reservations without permission. His latest mission is to stop Merrin, a Thirteen who tortured, ate, and mutilated the corpses of his fellow passengers on a flight from Mars.

      Despite the thriller plot, the majority of this book was actually a slow slog for me. The characters (especially, but not only, Carl) communicate mostly in several-page rants whose main points seem to be how tough the speaker is, how hard they've had it, and how terribly unfair the world is. And it is a terrible world! Morgan is master at creating dystopias and the hard-bitten noir types who survive in them. But I can only read so many monologues per chapter, and each of the characters is so disheartened, jaded and unhappy that reading their thoughts was a drag. The other problem is that the first 400 pages are just Carl and his various police and COLIN partners taking suborb flights all over the world to try to intimidate and threaten various underworld types (most of whom get monologues of their own). It seems very pointless. Now, all that time bumbling around does actually have a point, because all the while Morgan is dropping hints and clues to a worldwide conspiracy. In the final few chapters, all of it comes tumbling together into a beautiful solution that makes sense of everything, even bits I didn't realize had confused me before.

      I really was impressed by the mystery/thriller writing--it's some of the best I've seen. But it couldn't make up for how unpleasant I found hyper-masculine Carl, nor how bored I was by the sentence fragments that make up the narration.
    • 4/5
      The main character is virtaully unstoppable and that's always reassuring...I like the way Morgan forces us to think about a future not all that different than our present, but I too prefer the Kovacs character...
    • 4/5
      I really enjoy Morgan's work. This is very different from the earlier Altered Carbon but still very good.
    • 4/5
      Sci-Fi always has something to say about the present, and the question here is a familiar one: How much does free will exist, and how much of our lives is determined by genetics, childhood experience, and society's prejudice? There are some excellent conversations between the characters on the topic, and the events of the book highlight the question more than they provide clear answers. Occasionally there was just a really strong sentence that stuck with me. For instance, "Anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet."

      The book's protagonist has a relatively simple way of seeing the word that allows him to be a vehicle for the reader. His mentor summed it up, "Only live with what you've done, and try in future to only do what you're happy to live with."

      The overarching story is a competent crime thriller with a couple of unique touches and page-turning writing, but the asides and philosophical moments were my favorite part of the book.

      Here's a couple quotes to illustrate what I mean:

      Yavuz said, "At times, it shames me to be male. I mean, we index how civilised a nation is by the level of female participation it enjoys. We fear those societies where women are still not empowered, and with good cause. Investigating violent crime, we assume, correctly, that the perpetrator will most likely be male. We use male social dominance as a predictor of trouble, and of suffering, because when all is said and done males are the problem."

      In response, Sevgi says, "The way it looks from the historical context, the male cycle of civilisation had to come first, because there was no other way outside of male force to create a civilisation in the first place. To have law and art and science, you have to have settled agrarian societies and a non-labouring class that can develop that stuff. But that kind of society would have to be enforced, and pretty brutally in the terms we look at things today."

      There's also a lot of subtext about racism couched in an overt examination of prejudice based on genetic modification. One of the most interesting reoccurring events in the book was the children who had at least one parent that was a genetically-modified super-soldier, but who were being set up to be raised outside of the oppressive system that the book's super-soldiers were subject to. The eventual fate of one of the three was very up in the air, subject to a contentious legal battle and kept in cryogenic stasis until their fate was decided. The book's brooding philosophical super-assassin protagonist is set up as a potential guardian for the child, but that plotline is never resolved. The other two were in the care of their relate-able criminal mothers, and almost certain to survive unscathed into adulthood. This is an obvious set-up for a sequel (that has never been written), and I want to read that story a great deal more than the one I got.

      Words that jumped out at me from this book:
      adipocere - a grayish waxy substance formed by the decomposition of soft tissue in dead bodies subjected to moisture.
      antecuchos - Peruvian shish kabob, usually skewered beef and onions
      atavistic - relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral.
      blag - to persuade someone in a clever or slightly dishonest way
      chunter - to mutter or to talk in a low inarticulate way
      cimit - usually spelled "simit", a Turkish circular bread typically encrusted with sesame seeds. Widely known as a "Turkish bagel" in the USA.
      demodynamic - ambiguously either the flow of a demonstration or the flow of demonic power.
      lemeño - a type of criminal slang specific to Lima, Peru
      occlude - to block passage through
      onbekend - "unknown" in Dutch. A common surname in the former Dutch-ruled Indonesia where there weren't surnames.
      raki - an unsweetened, occasionally anise-flavored, alcoholic drink that is popular in Turkey, Greece, Iran, Turkic countries, and in the Balkan countries.
      rapprochment - (especially in international relations) an establishment or resumption of harmonious relations.
      rectilinear - characterized by a straight line or lines
      sahlep - a Turkish flour made from tubers of the orchid genus Orchis, or the drink made from the same.
      sicario - hitman or hired killer, specifically one in the emlpoy of South American drug cartels
      superannuated - no longer in use or valid or fashionable; too old to be useful; discharged as too old for use or work; especially with a pension
      virilicide - the elimination of masculinity.
      vivarium - an indoor enclosure for keeping and raising living animals and plants and observing them under natural conditions.
    • 5/5
      I am nearly half-way through and seriously immersed in this "grab em" SF novel, and I already feel that this is better even than Altered Carbon, which I loved. I am a very demanding reader and this stand-alone totally meets my demands. The characters are such that you absolutely want a sequel to materialize. I also really like the fact that this takes place in the near future, versus a lot of books that I have been less than excited about taking place in the distant future. Focusing on the near future makes the story more believable to me. If you are a SF fan, and not too squeamish about blood and guts violence mixed in, I would expect that you will like this book. As the Philadelphia Weekly Press put it in the portion of their review on the back cover, "[An] exciting 22nd-century tale that mixes Silence of the Lambs with Blade Runner....". Hell of a mixture.
    • 3/5
      Takeshi Kovacs may be a cliched hard-boiled badass but he's likeable and the whole series doesn't take itself too seriously. This book's protagonist is a cliched angsty asshole you just can't sympathise with but maybe that's the point. The premise is really wacky, or eerily prescient given it was written 10 years ago. In the future all men are betas and 13s are genetically modified manly Men and they do things only manly Men can do like beat people up, eat human flesh, torture people and tell it like it is. Sometimes I just can't it take it seriously despite the book really putting on the darker tones. Saved by plot and world-building.
    • 4/5
      Lots of characters and lots of action. Stay with it as it picks up speed as it rolls along. Delves into the prejudice surrounding genetically modified humans, but there is some bitterweet romance along with some great fight sequences. Morgan ties it all together and the end is satifsying, if not a little melancholy.
    • 4/5
      Carl Marsalis is a variant thirteen, genetically engineered for aggressive, hypermasculine traits. His kind were meant to be super-soldiers, but now exist in a society that hates and fears them. Marsalis makes a living hunting down other thirteens, but he's about to be hired for something much more strange and complicated than usual.I find myself with very mixed feelings about this one. I'm not sure how much of that is due to me picking it up at the wrong time and with the wrong impressions, though. It looked like it was going to be a fast-paced action thriller, the kind of thing that would be great for a sleep-deprived week of night shifts when my brain wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders. Well, there is definitely lots of action (and lots of violence and sex), but there are also lots of political and philosophical conversations, lots of complex world-building, and a surprisingly complicated plot.Mind you, even taking into account the sluggishness of my brain at following some of the plot, I'm still not sure what I think about that plot. It's an interesting set-up, and it ends in an interesting place, but some of the twists along the way are a bit... much. And those long political and philosophical conversations do slow down the pace and kill the momentum quite a bit. As for the philosophy itself, well, I'm not really buying the whole concept of the thirteens and what they're supposed to represent about humanity. Not that Morgan doesn't do some interesting things with it, but interesting isn't exactly the same as convincing.The world-building, though... That I loved. There's a truly impressive and gratifying amount of care and attention to detail in the way Morgan builds his future world. It's not so much in the big things, the technological advancements and geopolitical changes, although there is certainly enough of that. It's the little references to pop culture or history or current events, things that don't necessarily have anything at all do to with the plot but make the world feel lived-in and real. So much SF, including stuff that I otherwise really like, feels impoverished to me when it comes to that kind of detail, so it always delights and fascinates me to see it done really well. Even during times when I found myself just kind of wishing I could be done with this story already -- and it took me long enough to finish that I definitely did get to that point -- that alone made it feel worthwhile to me.Rating: 3.5/5. Which might honestly be a bit high, but I just gotta respect that world building.
    • 3/5
      Boring, excessive dialogue and sex. Terribly plotted and no characters to speak of. Some cool science stuff but that's not really the point of cyberpunk.
    • 4/5
      This reads as an explosion of talent; rough around the edges, but it's got depth. Morgan has built a well thought-out world for his characters to live in, so much so that the plot of this book takes a backseat to pretty much everything else.
      I'm writing this about 80% of the way through, and I don't expect that I'll need to edit my impressions based on the next 20%. For me, this book isn't the murder mystery, it's the landscapes, lore, and depth.
      If you love to get lost in a world skillfully built and masterfully exposed, give this a read.
      I'd award one more star if I cared about the plot in any capacity other than a reason to justify a constant change of scenery.
    • 1/5
      An extremely boring book with boring characters and I could not bring myself to finishing it.
    • 5/5
      So its been a long time since something of this genre took my attention. Ok something recently published.It was overall a great story. Loved the characters, even the "bad" guys. It turned out to be a great novel on politics (not in your face), sci-fi (love genetically modified things), there was even a "love" story (it by no means over took the story,and it wasn't....romance at all, if that makes sense) But then you should read the book and find out for yourself. Oh and lets not forget mystery. There were some very good, unexpected twists and turns. Great stand alone novel.

      Now I need to read more of this authors books.
    • 5/5
      Black Man is set 100 years in the future. And, yes, there are a bunch of sci-fi technological elements that are crucial to the story. But more important than the 100-year-hence technology is the vision of the future social structures and political reality which makes this a really interesting story.The story revolves around a man who is different, seen by some as a useful weapon, seen by most others as a monster who should be locked up or dead. This man is dragged into the case of solving a number of murders which seem to have been committed by "one of his own".The story moves from there, and while I don't think it's the kind of story you won't be able to put down, it is certainly a book you always want to pick back up and continue reading.The book turns out to be more than "just" a story. It goes from being story-driven to being almost purely character-driven. This works very well. Yes, the reader has become invested enough in the characters to care about them, but that's the easy part. The impressive part is that the reader has become sufficiently immersed in the world and the society around the story to appreciate situations and actions that can only be justified by, often very subtle, elements of the social politics which are part of the story.Of course, as the title would suggest, the book also deals with a form of racism, but not in the way one might expect. Engineered genetics are a reality in this book, and this shifts the premise of the discussion to a level which I think very few people would and should feel comfortable with. Few things in this book are clear cut, and this makes both the characters and the setting feel more believable.All in all, it is wonderfully difficult to pin down what this book is actually about. On its surface it could be seen simply as a sci-fi thriller. However, parts of the book also work well as a "what if?" philosophical discussion, using a future setting to discuss a number of complicated questions. At its best the book becomes thoughtful social commentary on a hypothetical society where a number of issues that exist today are amplified.I took issue with a few things in this book. Quite often it comes dangerously close to being corny and overdone. Most of the time it succeeds in not crossing the line, which makes for a very entertaining and fast-paced read. However, at one point it crosses the line into corny and overdone so thoroughly and completely that it becomes silly, and just feels weird and out of place.Overall I think this is a great book, and I'm not generally a sci-fi fan. This is a book with a story and characters that I think would hold their own in any universe. In some places it is a little rough around the edges for my taste, but I'm sure this is part of the appeal for genre fans.
    • 5/5
      A beautifully written, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching novel about a future in which what we think of as essential, innate human traits have been commodified - sexuality, masculinity, leadership, love, loyalty. The world-building is breathtaking. The protagonist is powerful, brave, brilliant, damaged and ultimately tragic. I think Black Man works on every level; lovers of the speculation of science fiction, the thrills of crime fiction and the craft of literary fiction should all find their respective itches scratched. It's known and appreciated within the SF community, but deserves to be far more widely read.
    • 5/5
      Morgan has again packed some sharp observations about society and politics into an action-packed mystery. Interestingly, this is the second novel I have read recently whose plot turns, at least in part, on the use of genetic engineering to bring back a subspecies of homo sapiens. The other is "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. In Watts book, genetic engineers have recreated the subspecies that gave rise to the vampire legends; Morgan posits a kind of feral human suppressed when hunter-gatherer societies settled down to agricultural and hierarchies, later revived as a kind of super-ninja, but shunned even while the powers-that-be find them useful. An interesting and thoughtful thriller.
    • 3/5
      An action SF cop drama; slightly cerebral; lots of sex and violence.
    • 3/5
      If Morgan wrote mysteries in their traditional setting he would be heralded as a master; however, he tells with the science fiction slant and it will be a loss for thousands.This however is not one of Morgan's better tales but still a good read.Imagine the setting of Bladerunner with the punch of Fight Club and the introspection of a Phillip Roth novel. He was a little heavy on the Roth side for me - characters commonly wore prejudices and brutal racism raw and bleeding from their ragged sleeves.
    • 2/5
      Richard Morgan back on form after a poor showing with Market Forces. Possibly a bit overly long, but exceptionally well written and plotted. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Excellent thriller with a nice twisty plot.I do have to wonder about the basis of this society, 200 years hence, and it's purported " virilicide". It seems like despite the supposed disempowering of the men, nonetheless ALL the institutionally powerful players in the novel were male. So: where was this feminization again? because although it was cited, it didn't seem to actually appear (even though, by the narrative, it seems like it'd be a really good idea...).
    • 4/5
      Damn Richard K. Morgan can write! It's almost as if this stuff is happening in some alternate universe and he's just there copying it down. His universe is so completely fleshed out you almost expect that he's got a set of encyclopedias sitting around his house with information that relates to the world he has created. In this case it helps that it's set in America but it's a completely different future version of America. All that said, I didn't enjoy this one as much as his Takashi Kovacs novels but that's mostly because they're more "sci-fi" than this one and I tend to like aliens and gadgets. This had modified humans, combat enhancements, and a station on Mars but it wasn't really all that out there.
    • 4/5
      An intriguing work of SF. It's definitely grounded in the conventions of the blockbuster thriller-- there's some act of violence or sex in nearly every chapter, and it's a long book --but it's smarter than it looks, and Morgan emerges finally as an author who is deeply interested in the complex interplay of ideas about genetics, identity, and race.
    • 4/5
      The premise: Carl Marsalis is what they call a variant Thirteen, the result of a failed experiment to essentially create super-soldiers. Now, Carl makes his living hunting down illegal thirteens, and takes on a job that might prove too big for him. A fugitive from Mars crash-landed a ship in the ocean and has been murdering his way across what the reader recognizes as the United States. The problem with this fugitive is that like Carl, he's a thirteen, but this one might just get the better of him, and there's more than one person who wants to make sure Carl never finds the guy, let alone kill him.My RatingGive It Away: in the end, I'm glad I finished it, but if I'd bought this as a hard cover, I would've been very disappointed. I didn't want to finish the book at all because it takes so long to really find its footing and bring the story together, and even then, it takes its sweet, meandering time doing so. There's certainly pay offs: the main plot comes together nicely in the end, though I still feel like something's missing, and the characterization felt solid too. The problem is that the book could've been much shorter, and while it would've required sacrificing some of the insane amount of world-building, commentary, and ideas presented, I think it might've made for a tighter, more focused book. The biggest problem is that I felt ambivalent reading the whole thing: this book lacked the siren's call, and it never made me want to pick it back up again after stopping. However, in the end, it's not all that bad. If you give this book a shot, give it until you complete a chapter in PART TWO (that's 100+ pages in) just so you can see how it comes together before making any decisions on finishing the book or not. The full review, which does include spoilers and cover-art commentary, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.REVIEW: Richard K. Morgan's THIRTEENHappy Reading! :)
    • 4/5
      Morgan gives us a plausible vision of our world a century hence, in which the world is coping with the ramifications of human genetic engineering. One particular group is the "thirteens": artificially created throwbacks to our hunter-gatherer past, lacking the evolved need to fit in to the rest of society; most of them are in internment camps or exiled to Mars. Our hero, Carl Marsalis, is one of the few thirteens loose in society-- and he hunts other thirteens who are out of control.A ship comes back from Mars and crash-lands in the Pacific Ocean, and the only survivor seems to be a thirteen skipping on the terms of his exile. Marsalis is brought in to try and hunt him down. The story unfolds as a mystery with a thriller's pacing and similar levels of violence to Morgan's other work.
    • 4/5
      Morgan's latest offering delivers yet another cool world from his expansive imagination. I was drawn to his writing by going through the Philip K. Dick award winners and finding Altered Carbon, which was an awesome story. He doesn't dissapoint this time either, the mercenary thread is back in his main character yet the newly created world that this novel lives in is very different from the Takeshi Novacs novels, but still really well developed and described. Thirteen challenges our notions about what it means to be human, how environment, or genetic modification might change behavior. It makes you think about the implications that led to the adbandonment of our hunter/gatherer ways in favor of settling, farming, and paying obedience to authorities. It offers a way of thinking about this pivitol point in human history that most people have never considered, that the traits most neccesary to survive became the least desireable trait in the settling of humanity. It makes us think about what it is to be human ourselves, what exists in our biology or physchology to create bonds with other people, to garner absolute hatred, or any other feelings and relationships that we experience.This novel is much longer than any one of the Kovacs novels, but promises action and turns in every chapter. I agree with another review which criticized it's length in some scenes, dragging the page count on unnecessarily, but for the most part, the depth he gives us, and subleties he hints at between the characters is great. The range of emotion displayed by his characters in this work is leaps and bounds beyond Altered Carbon. For a cyberpunk fanatic, this is a must read. There's something about describing technology that can't exist today, and could never exist with the laws of physics, that makes you wide eyed with wonder.Again, Morgan excels, and I would thouroughly recommend this one to any fan of Altered Carbon, or other author's such as Gibson, Doctorow, and Dick.
    • 4/5
      An interesting mix of science fiction and murder mystery. The main character is Carl Marsalis, working for the UN hunting down his own kind, genetically engineered men, designed as super-soldiers, called 13's or twists, unwanted and despised.He's currently in a Florida prison, held for some nebulous time because he was caught financing an illegal abortion. Released to hunt another 13, a man who was woken too soon on a trip back from Mars and resorted to cannibalism to survive. Now there's brutal slayings across America. Carl teams up with some others to hunt this dangerous man.It could have been shorter and lost some of the lag. I didn't really feel drawn to the characters and somehow felt that it was just filling time to the rest of the story. A good read, but not the best I've read.
    • 5/5
      Black Man by RKM.Quite good, I must say. A considerable leap from Altered Carbon, IMO. As a preface, I liked Altered Carbon very much, though I did find some of the violence gratuitous, and objected to parts of the concept of the digitizable human mind, which I think was woefully oversimplified. Which might have been more forgivable to me if he had written that concept with a lighter pen, or left more room for the imagination, or maybe even fleshed it out more fully. But it lay in the middle, and it troubled me.Black Man is a much more ambitious work from a literary point of view. His characters are very well conceived , almost exceptionally so for the SF genre. Especially --but not only -- the protagonist, Marsalis, whose full realization ought be applauded. Morgan captures subtleties of Marsalis' perceptions and his insights into others despite that Marsalis is not entirely human -- he is a genetically altered human whose thinking and emotional makeup differs from that of the ordinary human in entirely convincing ways. So Marsalis' perceptions and observations ring true, but in a way that is as satisfying and consistent as it is alien and alienated. And in the final analysis, we see him as intensely human after all.The book can be described as fast-paced, thriller, crime-SF. The plot is intricate. The world-building is admirable. It is not a short book.One has the feeling that Morgan has grown considerably as a writer from the days of Altered Carbon. I did not read the sequels to that book, so I don't know whether this growth was evident later in the series, but I relate to a reviewer's comment cited by Morgan to the effect that this is Morgan's best work "by a considerable margin".It is not a perfect book, but my criticisms are small compared to what is good:I found the plot to be a bit too tidy, with connections among the characters stretching credulity. I question whether this degree of plot intricacy was really necessary; could the book have been improved with further editing? As a rule, there is an overuse of the word "f***". Why is a Haag gun more terrifying than one that kills you right away? Dialog tags have frequent and undue adverbial modification, especially when Thirteens are speaking, and particularly via the word "evenly".As you can tell, I liked the book a lot. I recommend it strongly. It is not an easy read, but it would be tougher were one not so powerfully swept along by the action. If you were bothered by the violence in Altered Carbon, you will find no relief here either.