{"id":2126,"date":"2007-12-31T22:39:10","date_gmt":"2007-12-31T22:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-2126.html"},"modified":"2008-02-10T21:40:19","modified_gmt":"2008-02-10T21:40:19","slug":"richard-morgan-black-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/2007\/12\/31\/richard-morgan-black-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Morgan &#8211; <i>Black Man<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Is it yet another borderline sociopathic protagonist from Richard Morgan?  Yes it is.  Carl Marsalis is a &#8220;Variant 13&#8221; &#8211; genetically engineered to match the profile of the aggressive hunter-gatherers before civilization took a proper hold on the hard-wired parts of our psyches.  His job: to hunt down <em>other<\/em> Thirteens, who have been declared illegal.  He is recruited by COLIN, the agency behind the Mars Colony Initiative, to hunt down a particularly nasty specimen who has managed to escape from Mars, and is now blazing a bloody trail across the Pacific Rim.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, it&#8217;s all a bit screechingly brutal and violent, but I think this is deliberate on Morgan&#8217;s part:  by stripping his protagonist of social conditioning, he creates a viewpoint with which to coldly evaluate and criticize behaviours and mores that have become acceptable, but maybe should not be.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe it&#8217;s just a balls-out futuristic action thriller with some great characters and spectacular plot twists.  Hey, what do I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is it yet another borderline sociopathic protagonist from Richard Morgan? Yes it is. Carl Marsalis is a &#8220;Variant 13&#8221; &#8211; genetically engineered to match the profile of the aggressive hunter-gatherers before civilization took a proper hold on the hard-wired parts of our psyches. His job: to hunt down other Thirteens, who have been declared illegal. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books_45_stars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}