Two years ago I blogged about this fabulous new writer I had found named Richard Morgan because I found him very clever in how he used his genre (sci-fi) to relax constraints in a way that created very thoughtful fiction. In his first book, Altered Carbon, Morgan sets a basic detective Whodunit in a world where people find it difficult to die due to the complete separation of consciousness from the physical body. The book is great fun and quickly turned into a trilogy that— like all good trilogies— loses steam in the middle, and picks it up again at the end.

Well this summer Morgan came back with another excellent novel— Thirteen— which is the conceptual reciprocal of Altered Carbon. This time he's put the classic Fugitive plot in a world that is populated by "variants" (of the genetic variety) or humans that were bred for specific tasks. I'm not going to ruin the cleverness of the types that he breaks down (let's just say the run to some pretty base human qualities), but will instead recommend it as a highly entertaining (and thought-provoking) twist on the age-old question of nature versus nurture.

I've personally found that where people sit on the nature-nurture question tends to track the dynamic of the old Disraeli quote about 20 year-old conservatives being heartless and 40 year-old liberals being brainless, with the schism rooted right around when people have children. Though all of us want to believe we can be whoever we think to be, there is nothing like seeing fundamental character differences expressed from such an early age in all sorts of ways to make us parents feel that the effects of nurture are sort of irrelevant and that it's mostly about the code running in your chromosomes. And so it is especially entertaining to watch Morgan play with the ideas of nature fully constraining who we are in such a complete and fatalistic way. By the end of the book, you can't help but feel that there is a little bit of variant in all of us.

He also rocks at inventing new terms— in fact so much so that I am sure this guy is turning out idiom in Scotland as we speak). My favorites from 13? Twist and Cudlip. Go read it to find out just what they mean.