Search - Thirteen aka Black Man

One of these days, I'll figure out why I read dreck fast and hoping it will get better, instead of a bit at a time like the books I enjoy and like.

OK, the viewpoint character is one Carl Marsalis, a veteran of UK's Project Osprey (a super soldier project), veteran of Mars and United Nations Genetic Licensing Agency tracker. And oh yeah, he's a variant 13 - a form of human supposedly recreated from humanity's hunter gatherer days with a talent, no, inclination and flair for violence.

To put it mildly, he's a piece of work.

The setting is a bit more interesting, with a fractured USA (Pacific Rim, Confederated Republic (aka Jesusland), North Atlantic Union and possibly others). But its not compelling.

The plot revolves another 13 getting back to Earth from Mars via shuttle, in a method involving cannibalism and great violence. From there, he goes on an apparently random killing spree with identifying the motive being a major plot point for the book.

In many ways, it gets some things right - that designing human variants is a tricky business (the by-products of the Chinese black labs are a recurring theme). But, Morgan seems to miss a lot of the implications of the technology he brings into play. If you can engineer human variants, where are all the animal variants? All that's mentioned is a Saudi ops (attack) dog. Worse, he seems to have read some of the same neuropsych texts and articles that Peter Watts did, but not interpret them very well.

Ultimately, this is like Deathshead in that it borrows the terminology of transhumanism for a rather standard tech noir novel, without incorporating the mindsets and implications of the technology. This was a pure airplane book and not worth re-reading. And I honestly feel like I wasted my time with this.