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Black Man

Author
Richard Morgan
Genre
Media
Book
Publisher
Gollancz
ISBN
9780575078130
Reviewer
Ann

Synopsis

One hundred years from now, and against all the odds, Earth has found a new stability; the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy ...Genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century's wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars but now one has come back and killed everyone else on the shuttle he returned in. Only one man, a genengineered ex-soldier himself, can hunt him down and so begins a frenetic man-hunt and a battle survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world's last soldiers. BLACK MAN is an unstoppable SF thriller but it is also a novel about predjudice, about the ramifications of playing with our genetic blue-print. It is about our capacity for violence but more worrying, our capacity for deceit and corruption. This is another landmark of modern SF from one of its most exciting and commercial authors.

Review

It's been a while since I tackled any ‘hard' science fiction and boy, was this hard - aggressive, violent, bleak, depressing, biased. I ploughed on but ultimately gave up as I found I didn't care what happened to Carl Marsalis.

To be fair to the author, the book isn't hard to read, but the style and content didn't work for me. I want my fiction to entertain, amuse, educate and expand my views, and this didn't. Perhaps if I were of different age or gender, it might be different - I got the impression the anticipated readership would be younger and probably male .....

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