Today's ills via sci-fi killing machine in "Thirteen"

Richard K. Morgan's latest novel postulates the creation of genetic supersoldiers 100 years from now, then pans through the resulting global intricacies with a sure eye for the story at their heart. "Thirteen" (Del Rey, 544 pp., $24.95) is almost unbearably good. The scenes of violence his readers expect from Morgan are as skillfully constructed as ever, and completely necessary, given his material.

Morgan's supersoldiers, known as "thirteens," have been demobilized and exiled to Mars or to tightly guarded reservations here on Earth. Carl Marsalis, licensed to hunt down fellow thirteens who escape, doesn't have the biological capacity to feel remorse for the gory mayhem he causes as he chases and shoots down his prey with virus-laden bullets. But he does have other feelings.

Marsalis connects deeply with Sevgi Ertekin, a woman of Turkish descent living in New York. Ertekin is an ex-cop consulting for COLIN, the nongovernmental agency in charge of colonizing Mars. When a COLIN spaceship crash lands in the Pacific Ocean and a cannibalistic thirteen stowaway survives, then disappears, the two track him via Marsalis' genetically-enhanced intuition.

Ertekin is drawn to Marsalis — to his self-assured stance and his balanced, graceful way of moving through danger. And Marsalis, a loner, nevertheless longs for Ertekin. In a COLIN-owned apartment he surreptitiously watches her sleep, "sprawled on her back with her mouth half open, long-limbed and gloriously inelegant in the faded NYPD T-shirt and tangle of sheets ... " The intensity of Marsalis and Ertekin's ragged-edged, running-on-empty courtship rivals that of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, stars of Dorothy Sayers' classic mysteries.

It's this emotional core that fuels "Thirteen's" powerful effects and makes for some of Morgan's finest writing. But the author gets convincingly inside the heads of his other characters too, from the "Jesusland" refugee who leaves Wyoming for the economically advanced Pacific Rim, to the populist Andean neo-gangster who values ties of blood above corporate riches, to the mixed human/variant woman who knows she'll never be able to tell her partner what she really is.

Morgan also addresses important social issues: hierarchy and dominance, the tendency toward violence in males, the ways in which humans demonize one another.

Marsalis is a thirteen, but the human genetic material his creators used came from blacks. Thus he's doubly stigmatized. Morgan riffs on racial injustice throughout the novel (its UK title was "Black Man"). When British-born Marsalis spends four months incarcerated in a South Florida prison, inmates use a racial slur against him: "The first couple of times it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a dueling glove." Eventually it feels like the "verbal spittle" it's meant to be, and Marsalis fights back. And wins. Earlier he sardonically notes a beer ad in which black males are kept well away from light-skinned bathing beauties. But contrary to Hollywood clichés, Marsalis not only "gets the girl," he has sex with more than one woman. He doesn't even die as a result.

Morgan's to be commended on bucking stereotypes, though I personally had difficulty believing in his hero's blackness at times. While Marsalis' lab-experiment upbringing makes the absence of African-diasporic cultural behaviors believable, pertinent physical details were also missing, such as dry or "ashy" skin, and the flat-on-one-side effect slept-on-and-unpicked kinky hair can give.

In the end, though, "Thirteen's" gorgeous strengths more than compensate for these momentary weaknesses. Harrowing truths, gritty romance, complex politics, synapse-swift action, technological advances just vanishing over the event horizon: they're all there. They're all achingly good.

Nisi Shawl reviews science fiction for The Seattle Times. She is co-author of "Writing the Other: A Practical Approach," with Cynthia Ward.