Interview with Richard Morgan

Q: Black Man/Thirteen is relentlessly anti-racism from the jump, but sexual identity and sexual nature are a bit more jaded. Without getting into too much detail on plot and ideas, I can see the argument for Black Man/Thirteen as a misogynist novel. I can see an equal case for it as a staunchly feminist and even misandrist book. Do you foresee controversy with regards to this subject matter? Was that your intent?

I’m not really bothered by controversy one way or the other – as a writer, I don’t think you can afford to be. If you intend to write anything worth reading, you’re bound to upset someone sooner or later. It doesn’t pay to worry about it, you just have to get on and write, as honestly as you can, and let the readers and critics sort it out for themselves. And to be honest, there’s not much in Black Man, thematically speaking, that hasn’t already been touched on in my earlier books, so I don’t see any substantial storms on the horizon.

As far as the race and gender issues in the book are concerned, it’s worth pointing out that all I’ve done here is use the available genetic science; the idea that race offers any kind of marker for innate genetic differential was demolished conclusively back in 1972 by Richard Lewontin, and these days no-one but a bunch of sad-case white supremacists would give it house room; the evidence on the other hand that there are substantial genetic differences between the sexes at a psychological as well as a physical level is massive and continues to grow. Were it not for a willful and rather childish refusal to face these facts in the world of social sciences, there’d be no more dispute about this now than there is about Lewontin’s work on race.

Q: Whilst reading Black Man/Thirteen I became convinced it was set in the same world as the Kovacs books, and that the remarkable new technology coming from Mars was from the secret discovery of the alien tech from the later books. I was surprised therefore when in another interview you said they weren't in the same timeline. Can we expect to see further development of the Black Man/Thirteen setting in future books?

Yeah, that was a really cool idea about the Marstech – wish I’d thought of it myself at the time! :-)

In fact, in Black Man I made a concerted effort to get away from the Kovacs universe because, as I said earlier, I wanted to deal with issues the technology in those books allows us to sidestep – that’s to say the inevitability of death and the inescapable prison of our own flesh. So the fact we end up with a colony on Mars in this book as well was purely co-incidental – it’s simply that I think a human presence on Mars is absolutely going to happen, and any book set more than a handful of decades ahead of now is going to come off pretty unrealistic if it doesn’t accept that fact in some shape or form. Of course, your Martian colony doesn’t have to actually get a mention, or more than a passing mention maybe, any more than Australia has to get a mention in a contemporary thriller set in the US; but once I had the colony there as a given, there were just so many fascinating factors and issues to explore, that it ended up a big part of the novel after all.

Q: With Black Man/Thirteen taking place before your Takeshi Kovacs novels, was the idea for the book gestating all along or did Carl Marsalis come to you after Kovacs?

No, it’s all fresh, apart from the name. The first (and now defunct) novel I ever wrote featured a cop called Darius Marsalis – I was listening to a lot of Branford Marsalis at the time, it was a sort of homage – but Dari Marsalis was nothing like the Carl Marsalis in Black Man.