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| I have read the Black Man! To be exact, I spent six hours reading "Black Man" (or Thirteen as it's called in the States) from start to finish. What do I think? I am *so* glad you asked. I think it tells the story of Carl Marsalis, a rather specialized kind of bounty-hunter working for the Colony Initiative (COLIN). "Colony", of course, is in the interplanetary sense. So. Story Begins. Ship plummetting. Mars to Earth. AI down. One survivor. Eaten mutilated crew. Oh shit. The survivor is a Variant Thirteen, the physical end-product of a theoretical excursion in reductionist anthropological genetics (see my previous Black Man post). Among other things, Thirteens, derogatorily referred to as "twists" are incredibly ruthless and capable of doing whatever is necessary to complete their goals (much like my Expedients* actually). In this case, that goal was surviving the very long very cold trip between Mars and Earth. As you've already guessed, Marsalis belongs to that very exclusive club. Thirteens were originally created for the deepest of black ops work (Middle East and other hotspots). Later, they became a sort of global strike force, celebrity superheroes in a sense; America and Britain maintained Project Lawman and Osprey respectively. It didn't last; as usual, we the people ate our idols from the feet up. The other Variants (bonobos, basically ultra-submissive high-libido human sex toys and hibernoids, long-term space travel tweaks) were mostly left alone, but the Thirteens? They got put in reservations because hey, they're all monsters, right? A few exceptions got the unenviable job of hunting down escapees in exchange for money and their own freedom. So. Marsalis. Earth. Prostitute. Vice-cop. Framed. Uh-oh. Deep South. Prison. Left-over racists and assholes. Attempted shankings. Saved. Sevgi Ertekin and her partner Tom Norton are investigating the crashdown situation. Bright Idea Time: use a monster to catch a monster. Marsalis gets sprung and the Dynamic Duo becomes the Truculent Trio. Norton, smart and partrician-handsome as he is, finds that as soon as you, a straight woman and a Thirteen are put in the same room, you have no choice but to look down and contemplate your own comparitive lack of worth (paraphrasing Norman Mailer here). You can't win, you can't draw, you can't not play the game. So you'll lose. Misunderstandings, xenophobia, red-herrings, sexual politics, sex, primate hierarchy bullshit and much more ensue. One of Morgan's major theses is that a large percentage of humanity's problems exist because men are in charge and have been for too goddamn long. Another is that swinging the pendulum completely the other way isn't a valid solution either. Problem is, without an extreme response, you won't be able to change the system enough. Then again, perhaps it's the wrong angle to look at things. Instead of looking at it as "more women in charge = things getting better", it can equally be viewed as "things getting better = more women in charge." How far women can go without running into all those little glass ceilings (and walls) is a measuring stick of how civilized your society is. I think he's right about what would happen if the number of women in positions of power and importance reached a critical mass. Something, some essential mechanism in the world-machine would flip over and *change* things drastically. Couple that with generations of children being born into a world where gender is effectively and utterly irrelevant as a social metric. This process is referred to as "feminization" and, by and large, it's a good thing. It could hardly make things worse, now could it. Another point I'd like to make note of is that the Thirteen mystique is exactly that. The whole idea of made-to-order hunter-killers is the idea of forcing the territory to match the map, squeezing live flesh-and-blood into the square holes of myth. Thirteens are badass killing machines because they're trained from childhood to be badass killing machines and told they are badass killing machines and conditioned to believe they are badass killing machines. What else are they going to be other than badass killing machines! So, now they're badass killing machines, what do "we" do? We hate and fear them, like gays, like mutants, like any and every other Other you care to think of. There's nothing they can do really that special forces can't. Their prowess is like celebrity, a Jungian placebo effect. Morgan does thick wonderful things with words and worlds. He grows these thickets of places and imagery and people, leaving the reader to slash through them, seeking and missing things in equal measure. Come through this territory again, he whispers to you on the wind, dig around in that underbrush, count the rings in that fallen tree. Check out that half-eaten carcass, see anything you like? I think he is the male Elizabeth Bear; they share a similar density of character, of gesture and stationing (to borrow a term from Keats. See? I'm fucking erudite over here!) although they handle violence differently i.e she salts it, he dollops it. All good. Minutiae - Morgan is the the most actively unsexist male writer I know of, only comparable with Warren Ellis. In fact, I think his opinion of the male gender is very similar to that of Takeshi Kovacs, even if it doesn't quite reach the venomous depths of Kovacs' misandry. - I'd give someone elses body parts to read a book about the "uncles" and "aunts" who raised the Thirteens. There are shades of the SPARTAN program from the Halo books there, shades I can detect despite never having read them - or played the videogames. Shades of Spook Country too, which I have *also* never read. - "Virilicide" is a darkly hilarious notion. Apparently, the white, suit-wearing alpha males will kill themselves off with Viagra-induced heart attacks leaving the senstive guys and sneaky fuckers** in charge. - Would have liked to see more of the New Math and the whole Yaroshanko (Yaroshenko?) small-world networks concept. Hopefully, another book in this continuity will cover it. - real hypermales would be too busy counting the bullets in their gun to realize they should actually fire it. Hee, Norton, very hee. - I wish Carmen Ren hadn't been a Thirteen but still been just as scarily badass as she was. Plot-wise and narratively, it worked but it went against my personal kinks. - if Thirteens aren't allowed to have kids, why the hell do they have the equipment for it? Fanwank sez the testosterone of a functioning reproductive system is a factor. Smart money sez if they've got the genetics knowhow to make Thirteens in the first place, they should be able to give them aggression without naughty bits. - wondering what happened to Rovayo (I think) and Coyle. Sort of disappeared later on in the book. - Xtrasoming, another element that just kind of petered out. It's good what Morgan does in his universes though; you get the sense that technology actually advances, things get out-moded. The Envoys as of the end of Woken Furies? They are *so* obsolete it ain't even funny. Conclusion: It's no utopia (I know how much you people hate those) but racism and sexism are by and large gone, at least in the Western world. It's a fucking start. Too bad it's still a hundred years in our future, huh? PS I was wrong about tanindo. His translation was "way of the newcomer" so my whole sociobiology joke falls flat. Oh well. *Expedients have no taboo responses and are incapable of feeling disgust or squeamishness. They're a psychoengineered personality type, human weapons and whatnot. **please note: this is a real sociobiological term. I wouldn't make this shit up, would I? | ||||||||||||
comments: Piss or get off the pot!     |
razorsmile's journal - Forcing the Territory to Match the Map - A "Black Man" UnReview.
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July 12th, 2007 |
razorsmile's journal - Forcing the Territory to Match the Map - A "Black Man" UnReview.
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