I made good on my threat to read Thirteen. It came in the mail yesterday, and I’ve gone through the first 80 pages or so.

So far, I must say, I hate it. It’s not that I insist on reading fiction that glorifies my favored political and economic ideologies to the exclusion of others. Charlie Stross is a socialist and I still love his stuff. What I have a problem with is the same Marxist and progressive bete noires from the last fifty years (evil corporations exploiting the poor, health care priced out of reach, Christian theocrats legislating morality, etc) woven inextricably into a novel about the near future, even though here in the present I have already seen how many die in a proletarian Utopia, and quite prefer our capitalist oligarchy, thankyouverymuch.

In other words, it’s not believable. I’m fully capable of suspending disbelief in return for entertainment, but not to digest recycled Cold War socialist agitprop. On top of that, the dialog is often contrived, and the narrative is consistently ridiculous. I know making up names for drugs and cool technoslang is a common enough trick for gritty sci-fi authors, but it can be taken too far, as Morgan shows us time and again.

So, I’m left with a book that is both far-fetched Marxist nightmare scenario and dime novel dialog. It’s as though I’m trying to read Why Mommy is a Democrat for its literary value.

I suppose I’ll suck it up and finish the book, though I must say it’s not started well, and I will continue to whine about it until it stops sucking or, more likely, ends. Unless it gets markedly better, this will be my last Richard Morgan book.