Interesting comment from Richard Morgan

Buried within the brouhaha of the past week surrounding the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics definition squabble on SF Signal and elsewhere (including here), Richard Morgan raises an interesting point that I think might provide grist for the mill:

Hmm - this again.

I missed out on the thread about taboos, and thus the chance to engage with those contributors who seemed to think that we've entered some mired slough of moral relativism in which dark editorial forces force out the notion of "good" characters, admirable heroes and positive outcomes. But luckily for me, here we are once again wondering why our fiction tends to lean towards dealing with the negatives of the human condition. And once again, it seems to me we have this question utterly backwards; ask not why our genre tends to see the human future in bleak terms - ask instead why we suffer this constant cry within the genre to make room for cheap, plastic, rosy 'n' cosy models of human development appropriate to a Disney movie for five year olds.

Let's just take our bearings here. If we look outside the confines of the genre for a moment, what is it we think is going on in the broader field of fiction? Let's take a few notable non-genre books off my (and my wife's) shelf at random and see what their subject matter is:

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: a young woman suffers through the brutality of the Nigeria/Biafra war.

The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell: the Nazi Holocaust, told from the point of view of one of its more enthusiastic perpetrators.

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy: brutal and blood-soaked (and painstakingly researched) fictional account of filibuster scalp-hunting in the American west circa 1850.

Andrea Levy - Small Island: two educated and dedicated Jamaican immigrants suffer casually brutal racism at the hands of their white British and American counterparts in London during the second world war and after

Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn: no commentary necessary, I imagine.

Brick Lane - Monica Ali: a woman suffers within the stifling confines of a repressive sub-culture in London's east end.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami: an ordinary man is brought into confrontation with a powerful corrupt force hidden beneath the placid surface of contemporary Japanese society and inside his own family. Along the way he revisits war-time atrocities committed in occupied China.

Snow - Orhan Pamuk: religious fundamentalism clashes with militaristic state repression in eighties eastern Turkey

The Quiet American - Graham Greene: catastrophic political innocence and arrogance march hand in hand into Vietnam from America and cause nothing but misery in their wake.

Beginning to see a pattern? Need we go on to Rushdie, Pynchon, McEwan, Proulx, Roth, DeLillo? Or the American hard-boiled crime writing tradition? Back to Shakespeare, maybe?

We award accolades to literature when we feel it has reached into the human condition, laid it bare or provided a fresh angle on it, when it has told us or made us feel something true about that condition. Bleak comes with that particular territory as standard. Humans are a dodgy, brutal lot and the project of human civilisation advances slowly and haltingly at massive human cost in blood and pain, with many retrograde steps and absolutely no guarantee of success. This is who we are. If you care about what you're writing (beyond wanting to pay the bills, that is), then you must confront this in your work and do something honest with it. Anything else is pandering.

In mainstream literature, this assumption is so much a part of the landscape that it goes largely unremarked; anyone who thinks of SF&F as adult literature should not find it sticking in their throat either.

If I had the time to sit around to think of ways to poke holes in this, I suppose I could, but I'm a bit loopy now with the allergy meds for the spider bite, so I'll just open it up for people here to examine what he says. Is "genre fiction" (however that may be defined) too prone to look for the consoling comforts, with the occasional aghast look presented when a hard, "difficult" work that dares to examine the "human condition" in unflattering lights is published?

After all, people die all the time, often in prosaic fashion, sometimes in spectacular, gut-wrenching tragedies. This wide spectrum of death, destruction, and suffering has been presented in innumerable stories and fictions over the years, but why is it a big deal when a SF/F author utilizes tried-and-true methods to explore the darker elements of human existence? It is an interesting point that Morgan raises - what do you have to say in response to it?

Review of Richard Morgan's Thirteen

Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.

This quote from an earlier interview of Morgan by SaxonBullock in regards to his first novel, Altered Carbon, is a quite fitting means of introducing the theme of his latest noir/SF novel, Thirteen (Black Man in the UK). Fans of Morgan's earlier work will detect hints and signs of this being related in spirit, if not also in "universe," with his Takeshi Kovacs novels or with Market Forces. But instead of Thirteen being a mere rehash of the themes explored there, it takes on a life of its own, underscoring and pushing further down the rabbit hole towards some rather unsettling truths about ourselves and our societies.

Set in the early 22nd century, Thirteen is an extrapolation of today's trends and fears. Carl Marsalis is a Thirteen, a genetically-engineered human being who has the Area 13 of the brain retro-engineered to be a throwback to the hunter-gatherers of 20,000 years ago. Designed to be instinctive killer soldiers in a world where the fighting is more hand-to-hand than army-to-army (think the current Iraq/Afghanistan situations and multiply them tenfold), Operation Lawmen in the US and the Osprey project in Great Britain had to be shut down prematurely due to the Thirteens being resistant to control and guidance. Spurred on by fear of these ultra-Alpha Males, Thirteens are branded as lurking monsters and public opinion "forces" the governments to confine Thirteens to reservations on Earth or to ship them out to Mars.

The world of this time is still plagued with many of the troubles of our times. It is rather fitting that this novel reflects upon our worries and fears, as often the best SF holds a mirror to our faces to show us images of our societies that we might not be brave enough to confront. Ugly things such as racism, the view that genetically-modified humans are "others" and not really humans, all of this plays an important role in the development of Thirteen. For Carl Marsalis is about to find himself confronted with all sorts of mistaken assumptions about Thirteens, as he gets sucked into hunting down an escaped Thirteen who seems to be engaged in a frightening "random pattern" of murders in the remnants of the United States, now divided into three parts.

Thirteen is in equal measures a noir-style murder mystery akin to Altered Carbon, a philosophical look at what makes humans often be so irrational and fear-ridden, and a cry-to-arms attack on a host of related beliefs and trends of today that have made his fictional 22nd century world seem so frightening and yet familiar to us. It is not a novel of naive hope, but instead a story where a lot of good people suffer due to the machinations of people who know how to herd the cattle well.

Morgan does an excellent job in portraying Marsalis and NYPD detective Sevgi Ertekin, whose been assigned to assist Marsalis in his manhunt. Their interactions for the most part felt logical and there was quite a bit of underlying tension between belief and actuality that is seen in their scenes together. Other characters, from Sevgi's boss, Tom Norton, to others in the chain of command, are presented well, albeit not as well-detailed as Carl or Sevgi. The fears of a Thirteen are played out in many different ways as the murder mystery plot unfolds, with some surprising twists and a false ending about two-thirds of the way into the story.

The story held my interest and indeed forced me to read it in incremental sections so that I would have more time to process all the possibilities presented within. The quote I cite above summarizes succinctly the overall effect of Thirteen. There are no winners, just various victims and losers in this world.

Summary: Thirteen is a fast-faced noir mystery/near-future SF dealing with genetic manipulation, human fears and grouping patterns, and the question of what does it mean to be "human." Told in third-person PoV, Thirteen is 543 pages long with the feel of a novel half its size. Highly recommended for fans of Morgan's previous works and likely will be considered the best of his five novels. Possibly a candidate for many Best of 2007 Awards.

Release Date: July 3 (US), available now (UK, as Black Man).