by Mike Collins

Your new novel has different titles for the UK and American markets. "Black Man" in the UK and "TH1RTE3N" in the US. Why is that?

The obvious – Del Rey were unhappy with the title Black Man for reasons of racial sensitivity. Race is a far more spiky issue in the US than it is in Europe (which is not to say there isn’t plenty of racism in Europe, because there is) and everyone treads that much more carefully. I’m not too upset about the change, because Thirteen is a pretty solid thematic summary of the book in its own way, and Black Man wasn’t in any case the original title I had in mind – though I do think it’s very powerful in a way that Thirteen maybe isn’t. I think it’s a shame Del Rey have to worry that the title alone will spark an instant negative response, rather than trust that people will read the book and then judge – but then again, they’re at the sharp end, culturally, and I’m not, so it seems reasonable to be guided by their sense of things.

Carl Marsalis is quite the lead character. Tell us a little bit about him and where he came from.

Carl Marsalis, the black man and the thirteen of the title, is one of a series of engineered humans, in his case engineered for combat, who have been genetically modified not so much in any physical aspect as in the way they think and feel. It’s a specialism based on designed aptitude, and the book aims to show, among other things, that the aptitudes required or desired by our society are often very frightening things. Marsalis exemplifies all the fatally attractive aspects of empowered old school male behaviour – he’s confident and competent with violence, physically very tough and totally self-reliant. He’s also frighteningly likeable and very sexually attractive. These men, the thirteens, were designed to solve the problem of an increasingly soft and civilized western world having to fight enemies who were neither. Unfortunately, the experiment wasn’t a huge success because the same tendencies that gave the thirteens their combat survivability also made them very difficult to order around or place in co-operative groups. Eventually, there was a reckoning in which stock was taken of the genetic mess the human race had got itself into (the thirteens are far from the only engineered variants around) and anyone with thirteen tendency was either imprisoned or exiled. Marsalis found a loophole in the system and now makes a living of sorts hunting down his fellow thirteens when they jump the reservation, but he still exists on sufferance from standard human society, and that’s a very precarious existence indeed.

"TH1RTE3N" is a very different novel from what you've written previously. It's much more emotional for starters. Was that a conscious choice?

Possibly. I mean, I didn’t sit down and think “I must make this a more emotional book”, but I was concerned very early on to fully address a number of issues relating to what you might call heroic violence and its fallout, and there was no way to do that without taking a different approach. The Kovacs books and Market Forces all touch on the problematic nature of violent heroes, but they’re too fast and furious to really linger on that theme in particular, because there’s too much else to get done. So yes, I think I was aware right from the start that this was going to be a broader, more considered type of narrative than I’d tried before.

In Carl's world America is a very different place. Can you talk a bit about how and why you've separated the US into how it appears in the book?

I owe the initial inspiration to the “Jesusland” map that appeared on the internet just after the 2004 Presidential elections. That’s when I first started to give the idea any serious thought. But I think it’s become increasingly clear to everyone over the last couple of decades that there are – at least – two very different Americas out there, and in contrast to the European Union, which seems to be subsuming its cultural and political differences in a general (and somewhat smug, if I’m honest) general sense of modernity, these different aspects of America don’t seem to be reconciling at all. If anything, they’re more savagely at each other’s throats than ever. So I found myself wondering how it would play out if that savagery was ever genuinely set loose, and what the geo-political consequences would be.

Do you think America is likely headed towards a "Jesusland"?

Well, I think substantial areas of America, demographically, are already there. And that’s really emblematic of the problem. Just how is it possible to have numerous and influential members of the citizenry in the most advanced nation on Earth still arguing that a hundred and fifty years of Darwinian evolutionary theory is some kind of hoax? What kind of failure in rational thinking and education must that indicate? Of course, I don’t believe the splits I’ve imagined in Thirteen are likely to occur in political fact, but in cultural terms, I think the process is already moving smartly along. The west coast of America is undoubtedly becoming increasingly attuned to the economic and ethnic rhythms of the Pacific rim. Attitudes to the environment really are diverging as California’s supposedly Republican governor and various politicians in the north eastern states all begin to address the issue of global warming, while the heartland continues to kick against it. Secessionism is alive and well as a political idea across the Deep South. So-called red states receive more in federal aid than they contribute in tax dollars, and still go on cutting their own throats by supporting anti-government politics. New Orleans dies in the mud like any third world disaster area, New York bounces back from 9/11 as a rallying point for the modern western world. And last year I watched a frightening documentary about a college in the US founded by born again Christians for the expressed purpose of sending young fundamentalist men and women to Washington in a bid to capture the organs of government, and ultimately the Presidency, for their religion. So yes – there is Clear and Present Danger.

Carl is a Variant 13, a genetically modified super soldier that the world now shunts off to prisons or worse yet ships off to Mars. At the start of the book he is in the employ of the UNGLA where he hunts renegade 13's. Obviously this doesn't make him very popular with his "brothers"…

No. You can see their point.

One of the themes in the book is prejudice. We see it in how it's directed towards the variants as well as how the different sides of the fenceline in the former US react to each other. Why was this something you wanted to write about?

It seems to me that the biggest and most basic problems we face as a species now come from within us rather than without. Chief among these – along with short sighted greed – is a dynamic that can best be summarized as ignorance => xenophobic fear and hate => violence. Now there are very sound evolutionary reasons why that dynamic is so enduring. Fear and hate are powerful unifying tools, they weld members of an identified group together in response to a perceived threat from outside, from the Other. To that extent, like Gordon Gekko’s greed, xenophobia works. Unfortunately, as a global species, we can’t afford that dynamic any longer, and we need to recognize the fact. The Jesusland tendency stands squarely in the way of any progress we can make here because it actively promotes willful ignorance and, not surprisingly, acts as a breeding ground for exactly the kind of divisive fear and hate that go hand in hand with that ignorance. And what’s worse is that a culture with those attitudes in place is inevitably going to engender similar behaviour in those it’s faced off against as well. If someone hates you, it’s not long before you start hating them back. So it was important to me to show not just how fucked up Jesusland has become, but how its bigotry inevitably infects those opposing it as well.

Aside from Carl, you also have a pretty formidable lead in Sevgi Ertekin. She's a former NYPD cop and now a COLIN agent. Did you know in the beginning how big a part she would be in the story?

Absolutely It was very important that this novel should have both an inside and an outside view of Marsalis and the thirteens, and that both views should be taken seriously by the reader. So we get to see inside Marsalis’s head through his narrative, but we see him consistently from the outside through Sevgi as well. And the crucial point is that both Marsalis and Sevgi make mistakes in what they believe, you can’t rely on either of them to get it exactly right. So, if I’ve done my job properly, these two views will balance against each other, forcing the reader to build their own third perspective on what the truth might really be.

This is the first time I recall you using multiple pov's in one of your books, or at least in how frequently you shift perspectives. Is this something you plan to do more often?

Well, Market Forces had third person narrative and an occasional shift to other characters’ viewpoints, but you’re right that the shifting about was nowhere near as extensive as it is in Thirteen. It’s been an interesting experience working this way, but I can’t say I’ve fallen in love with it as a technique – it’s very hard work, for one thing, and requires an enormous amount of discipline to get right. And I do still have a soft spot for the immediacy of first person narrative – I think there’s an authenticity of tone to it that’s hard to beat. But the thing is, there just was no way to tell the story of Thirteen without multiple povs. First of all there was the issue of the inside/outside perspective on the thirteens that I mentioned earlier, and then there was the complexity of the plot and the broad terrain it covered, both of which meant I needed to be able to skip about all over the place. So the logistics of what I wanted to do really dictated the form. I’ll doubtless use the same techniques again at some point, but equally certainly I’ll also go back to first person when it suits the material.

"TH1RTE3N" is at heart a mystery unfolding in a near future setting. It's a story that could work set in our own present time for the most part. What is it about the reasonably near future settings that work for you?

Well, I’m not sure I could get away with genetically engineered human variants in a contemporary setting – not without it coming across like an episode of the X-files, anyway. Or maybe one of those rather irritating novels that masquerade as mainstream fiction by grafting their speculative concept onto an otherwise unaltered vision of now. Yes, you, Mr Ishiguro – please step forward and make yourself known. If you really want to write about the impact of future technology, I think you owe it to your readers to make some attempt at building a credible future in which to set it. Anything else starts to look suspiciously like laziness.

For me, the double benefit of near future settings is that they offer a helpful frame of reference and that alarming sense of coming-real-soon-so-fasten-your-fucking-seatbelt, while at the same time liberating you from any need to do long and tedious research into the exact details of, for example, contemporary organised crime in Peru or the NYPD’s current approach to data-theft. You can just borrow what you need and set it up as best suits your narrative and thematic purposes. And while I suppose it’s true that the narrative skeleton of Thirteen is pretty much the same as a contemporary mystery thriller, the themes I wanted to deal with couldn’t really have been laid out effectively in the here-and-now – not least because the book deals with the aftermath of the genetic technology rather than its advent.

A large portion of the book takes place on the altiplano and touches on some of their legends. Do you have a special interest in that part of the world?

I have an enduring interest in what for want of a better word you could call the Hispanic world. That’s largely because I’m married to a Spanish woman, I speak Spanish fluently and I have spent a lot of time in Spanish and Hispanic cultural contexts. The altiplano connection comes indirectly from that, in that my wife and I spent about a month and a half traveling around Peru and Bolivia, and much of the inspiration for the book came from those travels. I’d recommend a visit to anybody - it really is a remarkable part of the world.

In my opinion this is far and away the best thing you've written. Was this one hard to write?

Thank you very much. Yes, it was. Unlike my other books, Thirteen has not been primarily narrative-driven. It came together, painfully slowly, out of a large number of disparate bits and pieces – the trip to the Andes, the recreational reading I’d been doing on genetics, my visits to North America and the changes in the political landscape there, memories of my time spent living and working in Turkey, gender politics, Islam and its current impact on modern life (and vice versa, of course), conversations about quantum maths, articles on nanotechnology….. I remember once reading an interview with William Gibson in which he commented that in the past SF books were very often written about one single technological or scientific development – a matter transmitter! intelligent machines! telepathic policing! - as if that development would take place in some sort of vacuum, as if the new thing, whatever it was, would be the sole important factor in this future society; whereas of course, our world is in fact stuffed full of new science and technology, any single aspect of which might once have served as the motor of an SF story, but none of which can be surgically removed from the wider context. His point, as I recall, was that writing science fiction now is far harder than it used to be because in order to create a credible future, you have to imagine not just a single development, but an entire pastiche of human and technological change. Well, I’ll certainly attest to the hard work element of that argument – bringing together all the stuff I’d been thinking about and wrapping it around the narrative has been very hard work indeed. So I’m very glad you like it.

One of the things that always pop up in your work is innovative technology that people use to main each other. Carl starts off with weblar body armor and uses a gun that fires viral ammunition. Later in the book we meet a character who has bio alloy in her hands for close combat. Do you just let your imagination run wild or do you try to have some basis in reality?

Well, a bit of both. Weapons like the sharkpunch and the Haag gun occurred to me on the fly, without having to do any actual research – though in the latter case I had used the idea of bioactive ammunition before, in Market Forces. In part, the whole thing was imagistic rather than technological – I wanted Marsalis to be a very frightening figure, and just as you give your epic fantasy heroes a magical sword to define their killing potential, it seemed appropriate to equip the Black Man with some really scary weaponry. The weblar, though, comes from a handful of articles I’ve read recently on the possible uses of spider silk in bullet proof fabric – it makes a lot of sense if you consider how incredibly resilient a spiderweb is for its size. Anyway, seems the main problem for the manufacturers right now is how to get enough non-unionised spiders working shifts to…….

Without spoiling the ending, do you think you might return to Carl's world or any of the characters featured in "TH1RTE3N"?

Definitely – I very deliberately left myself space for that. I think the issue of variant thirteen has probably been explored in about as much depth as I’m interested in, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use thirteens as characters in other stories. And the other variants that I came up with each suggested their own narrative trails as I was writing them, so there are elements there that I’m certainly not done with. Plus the world itself, the dynamics of Jesusland and the Rim, the colony on Mars and the nanotech are all freighted with potential. Expect at least one more novel in this setting, possibly several.

You've written two well received comic series for Marvel featuring the Black Widow. Is there any more comic book writing coming up? Any other characters you'd be interested in exploring?

The comic-book thing is certainly on hold at the moment, but that’s logistics rather than personal preference. I’ve got some nice ideas, and some sympathetic ears at Marvel and Vertigo/DC, and in fact my own US publishers, Del Rey, have talked about me doing a graphic novel for them – but right now I want to focus on getting my next novel up and running. My own personal genetic wiring is pretty classically male, in that I have a hard time concentrating on more than one thing at any given moment, so sidelines like the Black Widow tend to slow me down badly elsewhere.

As to other characters, I think the Black Widow experience has made me realise I’m probably not cut out for mainstream Marvel/DC properties – Black Widow: Homecoming was very well reviewed, and I certainly enjoyed doing it, but as far as mass appeal goes, well – there wasn’t any! The series didn’t sell very well, and it seems the overt politics and ambivalent attitudes to heroism, sex and violence weren’t that happily received by the core comic-book readership. And those elements are integral to the way I write. Let’s put it this way – Spiderman 2 and Sin City count among my worst ever movies, and both were box office smash hits. Now that’s a serious mis-match of target market and writer. And companies like Marvel and DC are in business to sell product to that market, not stroke the egos of difficult and unpopular auteurs. So while I’d love to write a third Black Widow – have the sketched plotlines in fact – there’s no reason on Earth why Marvel would pay me to do it. I think any future comic-book work I do is likely to be strictly marginal, own-character stuff.

You've mentioned working on a noir-ish fantasy series called "Land Fit for Heroes". Any updates on that?

Yeah, it’s rolling. We’re still at the early stages, a few chapters in with my characters wandering around not having much clear idea of what’s going on – which to some extent echoes my own situation as well! I’ve been talking a good fight about shipping Kovacs-style noir tendency into the fantasy arena for some time now, and now I finally get to do it, I feel like I’m standing on the rim of a vast unexplored land with this gang of grubby conquistadors and their siege engines at my back. What to grab and sully first? I mean, there’s nothing we can’t do to this place, right guys? So, uhm, yeah - there is an overarching narrative in there somewhere – just have to shake it out. Watch this space.

Richard Morgan will be touring along the west coast in the near future.

Here is a list of upcoming appearances:

ON TOUR WITH RICHARD K. MORGAN

SEATTLE, WA Monday, July 23
University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE.─7:00pm
Talk, Q&A, Signing

PORTLAND, OR Tuesday, July 24
Powell’s Books, 1005 W. Burnside─7:30pm
Talk, Q&A, Signing

SAN FRANCISCO, CA Thursday, July 26
Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street ─7:00pm
Talk, Q&A, Signing

SAN DIEGO, CA Saturday, July 28
Comic Con International, San Diego Convention Center
Signing

Read 2005's Richard Morgan Week at YMB

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