Thin Air

My first book by this author and it won’t be the last, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it and recommend it as great read

Hot on the heels of the <i>Altered Carbon</i> adaptation I didn't even bother to watch*, Richard Morgan's first new SF in longer than I care to think about. It opens hard on a grotty, broken-down Mars colony which instantly feels real and in-your-face, right down to the obsolete SF trappings retained for the sake of tourist nostalgia, and the passers-by arguing intently about whether or not the much-hyped new rain system is actually worthy of the name: "Oh <i>fuck</i> off, Seepage wouldn't even make it down here. Look there - it's making <i>puddles</i> already." It also makes an unnecessary difficulty for itself with the introduction of the all-powerful Colony Initiative – abbreviated to, yes, COLIN. Still, even with that handicap this is a propulsive read which I would deem 'page-turning' if only I hadn't been reading it as a Netgalley ARC on my 'phone. Screen-sliding? And it's that sort of immediate tech-derived detail at which Morgan excels. Not that I didn't enjoy his fantasy** sojourn, but there was always that faint sense that, through a slight deficiency in his familiarity with the field, he thought he was doing something newer than he actually was. Back on home turf, that's never an issue. Yeah, the plot is broadly familiar stuff – it's set somewhere adjacent to the earlier <i>Black Man</i> aka <i>Thirteen</i>, as witness lead Hakan Veil being a hibernoid, and follows a badass on ambivalent terms with the law as he gets caught up in a bigger, more dangerous mess than he anticipated. Exotic weaponry is deployed, inventive physical violence crunches, and sexual tension sparks. It's good fun, for sure, yet nothing more than that. But all this standard fare is just the skeleton on which to hang a world where the West's big Martian settlement goes by the noble name of Bradbury...but the thoroughfares tell a less high-minded story, with streets named after everyone from Musk down to Hayek, and the valley in which it sits is more generally known as the Gash. There's vacuous, speculative 'news' on repeat on the screens, "And none of it could quite hide the colossal dearth of facts currently available to anyone in the media machine. More than anything, it reminded me of listening to the high, thin scream of air whistling out through a hull breach and into the vacuum beyond" – never have I seen the sensation of watching the endless coverage of Brexit or Trump so well encapsulated. There are mosquito-like drones injecting new code to the body to ensure optimised Martian survival, such that coming up from a hibernoid sleep means the same agonising delay as patches get patched and then patched again which we endure when facing OS upgrades. Hell, there's even the detail of Quechua being a lingua franca on Mars, because yes, now I think about it, of course people used to the Andes would be among the first ones able to cope with a half-terraformed world. But I didn't think about it. Morgan did, and that's why he's so good at this stuff. And at telling stories of the worlds we've made for ourselves, where the temptation to clean away the accumulated filth of corruption and vested interests crashes into the awareness of how much damage that sort of purge always entails. Ultraviolence with a social conscience.

*Yes, James Purefoy. But if you gut Quellism you've pretty much turned it into another bog-standard SF noir, and why would I have ten hours to spare on that?

**Yes, fantasy which ultimately tied back to his SF work, but come on.