Veil is a genetically modified mercenary trapped on a frontier Mars who stumbles into a mysterious world spanning plot thick with intrigue. As he tries to make sense of the unfolding events he finds himself in he seeks profit for himself and finally the truth.

I found the plot slow to develop with too much time creating the local Mars environment and the current technology. Veil's background and experiences as a mercenary locked in hibernation until needed that were tangentially discussed during the story were more intriguing to me than the story itself.

If you liked Altered Carbon, you will definitely enjoy Thin Air.  Like Altered Carbon, Thin Air’s antihero is former military ( in this case biologically altered from before birth)  who has bucked the system and gone private. His sarcasm equals his sense of fair play, and while he is excellent at what he does, he doesn’t take orders.  Havana Veil is the modern sci-fi version of the classic noir detective. As in most noir stories, the detective finds the assignment he is given is just a cover for something much bigger, Veil soon discovers that babysitting Madison Madikwe isn’t what he was told it would be.  Mars is a dangerous place, a play Palace for the rich, a place of suffering and entrapment for the rest. Now that the corporate overlords are auditing the planet, unease is growing, as are rumors of revolution. Hakan Veil knows how to make trouble, but will his connections and ingenuity be enough for him to unravel one of the largest conspiracies ever to threaten Mars.  


Thin Air is an astounding book.  The writing puts you directly into Hakan’s head, seeing with his eye.  It’s a difficult style of writing to master, but Richard K Morgan does an excellent job.  I found myself immersed in the action from beginning to end. Naturally as both Altered Carbon and Thin Air are sci-fi noir, the two have some common elements.  But the stories themselves are in no way identical. If you like sci-fi noir or sci-fi action, I heartily recommend Thin Air.


5 / 5


I received a copy of Thin Air from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.


— Crittermom

An amazing look into the not so distant future that combines the best of today's nanotech ideas with good old-fashioned political intrigue. I loved this book. I was coming off a read of Don Quixote and Hamlet so was looking for something fast paced and technical. This story fulfilled both needs.

I am always in awe of what the sci-fi writers of the past have imagined as our future and how spot on they have been in many cases. Since reading Gibson two decades ago, the new crop of writers is doing it again. Looking through a magic lens and telling us what to expect as our grandchildren reach our age. Thin Air is no exception. It adds to my belief that nanotechnology will change the way the world and other worlds are settled, constructed and maintained. TA adds a few of its own little wrinkles to this future world that I greatly enjoyed and found realistic.

A great story told well!

Morgan is the master of gritty, cyberpunk worldbuilding. So give him a couple chapters to get rolling in this new universe. I promise that it does get to a rolling boil. Hak will take you on a very exciting, very bloody rollercoaster ride. If you love Takeshi or Gil, you'll enjoy this one, too.

My one beef with Morgan on this is that the mess-maker-in-chief of "Thin Air" is named Hak. He could just as easily be named Takeshi or Gil. It seems like Morgan has one basic model in his character inventory. The same personality and snarky, bad attitude gets sleeved into a new body with a new name.

Just be sure to pack your body armor and lots of spare ammo for this mission.

Thin Air is basically a crime noir masquerading as science fiction. The setting is Mars, a hardscrabble colony world that makes most of its income by selling technology (Marstech) back on Earth, where it has acquired considerable cachet. The planet has changed considerably since its early colonial days--there is now an atmosphere, although remnants of the days of needing protection against vacuum are still around (this reminded me of the 1990 movie Total Recall). The planet is dominated by corporate interests and Earth Oversight, with a homegrown independence movement a factor as well.

Hakan Veil is an ex-enforcer whose body is augmented with military grade tech. He's a human killing machine, as we see right at the beginning when he carries out an assassination on an underworld crime boss (recurring extreme violence makes him an anti-hero at best). He wants to return to Earth above all else, and has made a deal with some foreign corporate interests in exchange for it. But the police release him early to provide protection for an Earth Oversight official named Madison Madekwe who is tasked with solving the mystery of a missing lottery winner. There are intimations that there may be more going on than a routine audit.

Mars air may be thin, but the plot quickly thickens. Veil finds himself under attack at the same time Madekwe is being abducted by forces unknown. Whoever they are, they are very well organized and equipped. Veil sets out to find her, with the additional incentive of a ride home promised by Earth Oversight. The closer he looks, the more Veil uncovers new players.

In the end practically everything he thought he knew turns out to be wrong. The climax of the book includes a dizzying amount of unexpected double-crosses and other revelations. Veil realizes he is in the middle of a potential governmental coup, and is forced to take sides--even against his own self-interest.

The mystery is completely resolved at the end, but it can't be described as fair play. There is so much of the planetary politics that is only hinted at before the conclusion that there is no way the reader could figure it out. We are as surprised as the protagonist. But it is still an exciting ride worth taking.

Wow, I really did not know what to expect when I started reading Thin Air over the past couple of days. I had heard great things about Altered Carbon, and have it on my list to read (and watch). Thin Air definitely kept my interest... I felt like I had come into the middle of the story, and thankfully I was intrigued enough to keep going because that was seriously the beginning!!! Futuristic sci-fi at its best, author Richard Morgan gives it all to us with action, sex, head spinning twisty plot, remarkable dialogue, and quite the rush as the reader gets caught up in the story!I highly recommend Thin Air for a different type of sci fi that is edgy,

This novel is deep and layered and I love that!!!! Hakan Veil is offered the chance to go back to Earth and all he has to do in exchange is be a bodyguard. With his high tech enhanced body, this should be a breeze but we all know it isn't going to be that easy. I can't wait to hear what you thought of Thin Air!!

Thank you to NetGalley, Richard K Morgan., and Random House Publishing Group- Ballatine for the ARC of Thin Air for me to devour and review. As always, my opinions are my own.

His best since Altered Carbon. Better than his later Takeshi Kovacs novels by far. I felt this was better world-building, but more importantly more interesting characters than he's written lately. He's written a great protagonist with an interesting back-story and great dialogue. There are developed minor characters here, and to my surprise even some sexual dynamics. The novel is an enjoyable read, less hard sci-fi, and more well written prose. At the same time he has created tech that will make you think William Gibson wrote it and Elon Musk is working on it. He does a great job of portraying a more mature civilization on Mars-gritty and isolated, but stubbornly proud.
This book was provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

In the interest of fairness, I couldn't give give stars for what was an otherwise good read, My disappointment with the book was that there were several cultural terms used that went unexplained. When a character says it does something that cannot be related to a familiar term or activity, what is the point in mentioning it? Review provided in exchange for an uncorrected proof.

Haken Veil is a hard-boiled muscle for hire. After getting arrested on suspicion of killing some lowlife, he somehow gets drafted into babysitting a Madison Medekwe, a corporate auditor from Earth. The purpose of her particular audit is to find out what happened to a blue-collar worker who disappeared after winning a lottery that would have paid his way back to Earth. True to tropes, things do hit the fan.

The rest of the book involves Veil snarling, swearing, punching, killing, and screwing his way through the underbelly of the Martian city of Bradbury to figure out the truth. Mix in an overdose of seedy criminals, corrupt officials, prostitutes, and hackers and you get cyberpunk version of a long island ice-tea — a mix of everything on the shelf. Ultimately that mix leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Thin Air is full of atmosphere and has a strong attempt at world building. But Other than a few side mentions about the gravity and being in domes, the book could really have taken place in any metropolis setting. Sure there are healthy doses of Martian politics but frankly it’s the standard Mars independence from Earth that has become a main trope. The city of Bradbury is full of tough talking f-bomb dropping characters with very little to like about them. The protagonist is not only unlikable but unrelatable. Even after flashbacks, we know little of him and thus have little investment in what happens to his character other than to see the novel to the end. An it does come to an explosive end at that.

Whatever failings that Thin Air has, Morgan does good job of making up for it in nice action set pieces that can be bloody and explosive. As graphic as the action is, the sex is even more so. The first time was jarring but by the third or fourth sex scene it does get ridicules in its graphic depiction of bumping uglies.

The plot does relatively tie up neatly in the end with conspiracies uncovered and mysteries solved. One character twist was pretty easy to spot from the start though. Maybe that was not an important twist as it really did not come as a surprise, only the timing of the reveal.

The world that Morgan created is quite an intriguing one and by the end I had hopes that there was more to the lore than vague references to other events o places like Ganymede. In the end the book was entertaining enough overall but a bit long.

Meet “Dirty Harry” on Mars. Hak Veil is a retired “overrider” ... former employee from birth of a galactic mega corporation . He lies in cryogenic stasis for 4 months at a time, waiting to be awakened at their discretion to do their bidding - usually as an enforcer or assassin. However, due to a failed mission he was fired and stranded on Mars for the last 14 years. Veil finds himself awakened and thrust into a “bodyguard” job of a female auditor from Earth - whose apparent job is to uncover dirt on local politicians and corporations. Veil still has available an AI system called Osiris that is embedded into his brain, that can instantananeously be called upon for tactical advise.
Morgan spins a convoluted and multidimensional tale of greed and corruption involving multiple factions in Mars society with extensive double and triple crosses - all laid out in an environment and streets reminiscent of Blade Runner.
Thanks to Netgalley and Del Rey books for providing an Advance Reading copy in exchange for an honest review of this amazing SF noir action thriller. And thanks to Richard Morgan for returning to his SF roots

I'm sorry to say that I could not get more than a sixth of the way through this novel. The writing is disjointed with lots of characters popping in and out, some of whom don't seem to have much to do with the rest of the story. There is a lot of vulgarity and violence.

The blurb sounded good and I hope others enjoy, but it is not a book for me.

I watched Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon on Netflix when it first came out and was so enthralled with the sci-fi, tech, and premise, that I watched all 10 episodes in a weekend and then bought the book to read. That was my first Richard K. Morgan book and I really enjoyed it.

When the chance came to read a new sci-fi book of his that was set on Mars, I jumped at the opportunity as I love everything Mars. Hak is an overrider exiled to Mars. He’s been bred as an elite soldier/warrior and has enhancements to make him the best. He ends up assigned as a bodyguard/babysitter to an Earth woman sent to Mars to do an audit and she’s kidnapped a few days later. Of course Hak does whatever is needed to find her. He is promised a ride back to Earth if he saves her so he’ll stop at nothing.

Although there were definitely aspects of Thin Air that I enjoyed, like the sci-fi tech and the gritty world-building, I did have a tough time getting through this book. The slang was hard to figure out, and the story started out pretty slow. I kept at it though, expecting it to make sense eventually, and it paid off. Everything came together.

This wasn’t my favorite book ever, but it was definitely a decent action packed sci-fi once it got going. None of the characters were particularly likeable throughout although Hak did finally grow on me towards the end.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Del Rey Books for the advance copy!*

Exciting news: Richard K. Morgan is writing science fiction again! Morgan burst onto the scene about fifteen years ago with a handful of dark, gritty SF novels. His debut Altered Carbon won a well-deserved Philip K. Dick Award and has since been adapted as a TV series on Netflix. It was followed by two more novels focused on protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, as well as the standalones Market Forces and Black Man (alternatively titled Thirteen or Th1rt3en in the United States), all published in a five year period.

Then, Morgan’s career took a surprising turn towards fantasy, albeit fantasy that was just as dark and gritty as the author’s prior SF output. The trilogy A Land Fit for Heroes is a stunning achievement (and very high on my personal to-be-reread-if-I-ever-find-the-time list) but its popularity may have suffered a bit because of 1) the overwhelming amount of dark, gritty fantasy crowding the shelves in those years and 2) the three year gap before the release of the second installment, followed by another three year gap before we got the third one.

And now, eleven years after the release of his last science fiction novel, Richard K. Morgan returns to the genre in grand form with Thin Air, a (yes, dark and gritty) novel set in the same universe as Black Man/Thirteen. (More about this shared universe later!)


If I have one criticism of Morgan’s writing, it’s the striking similarity of the main characters in his SF novels: hard, hyper-cynical men with dark pasts and a notable facility with extreme violence. You can draw a line straight from Takeshi Kovacs through Carl Marsalis to Thin Air’s Hakan Veil, a self-described “has-been ex-corporate enforcer.” The “ex” part of that description is problematic, as Veil was, quite literally, born to do this job. Like Marsalis in Black Man/Thirteen, he was genetically modified and trained from birth for a specific purpose, but unlike Marsalis, Veil is a hibernoid, meaning he is in a comatose hibernation state for four months out of every twelve and awake for eight. This makes him particularly suitable to become an “overrider”: a cryogenically frozen enforcer who can be thawed out remotely when trouble occurs on long-haul interplanetary journeys.

Overriders go through a “running-hot” period right after waking: obsessive focus, increased aggression, almost superhuman reflexes. This is helpful because their main purpose is doing things like putting down violent mutinies. (As the overrider manual dryly notes, the context they find themselves in when waking up is “likely going, or has already gone, completely to shit.”) No longer an overrider, Veil has been stuck on Mars for fourteen years after a failed mission got him fired. He now scrapes by as muscle-for-hire for the Martian criminal underground.

When Thin Air gets started, Veil has a run-in with Martian law enforcement in the person of MPD Homicide detective Nikki Chakana—easily my favorite character in a novel filled with memorable ones. This run-in eventually results in him being assigned protection duties for Madison Madekwe, one of a large team of auditors that has recently arrived from Earth to investigate fraud and corruption on Mars.

Veil and Madekwe visit several expertly drawn locations on Mars to discover what happened to a recent winner of the Mars lottery who has mysteriously disappeared. The prize for the lottery is not, as you might expect, money, but instead a free trip back to Earth. After all, Richard K. Morgan’s Mars is a combination of Wild West free-for-all, penal colony, and corporate dystopia. The “High Frontier” can-do pioneer spirit advertised in the brochures to lure new colonists is treated as a cynical running joke throughout the book, and there’s a lucrative “Indenture Compliance” industry for hunting down people who have violated their contracts by abandoning their jobs or sometimes simply losing their minds and wandering off.

Dark as it is, world building is one of Thin Air’s strongest points. It may be a cliché, but Morgan really makes this version of Mars come to life. Various neighborhoods and areas are described in a way that makes you feel like you’ve actually been there. Details about past events and bits of Martian history are skillfully dropped throughout the story, and various factions, from crime syndicates to rich Earth-born “ultratrippers” to a radical “Mars First” group, make the place feel as realistic and vibrant as anything I’ve read in the genre. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Morgan is building on a setting he introduced in a previous novel.

Full disclosure: when I picked up Thin Air, I was completely unaware that it’s set in the same universe as Black Man/Thirteen. Because it’s been eleven years and my memory sucks, I decided to squeeze in a quick reread of the earlier novel. Having now read both books back to back, I’m happy to say that you don’t really need any familiarity with Black Man/Thirteen to enjoy Thin Air. Even though the novels are clearly set in the same universe, they’re also set on different planets (Earth vs. Mars) and, more importantly, at least a century apart, so you can make perfect sense of Thin Air without having read the previous novel.


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That being said, Morgan is still not big on infodumps and instead lets the reader figure out the details of this complex, dystopic future by gradually piecing together hints from his characters’ interior monologues. These are the type of books where you have to be comfortable with not understanding some of the jargon for a while and trust Morgan to eventually explain it. That learning curve will be somewhat gentler for folks who have read Black Man/Thirteen, so it helps to be familiar with the earlier novel, but it’s not in any way required to enjoy the new one. (It would be actually interesting to compare and contrast the two novels, because there are some striking parallels between them, but that would lead us far into spoiler territory. Maybe something for an eventual re-read…)

Returning fans of Richard K. Morgan will immediately recognize the author’s high octane writing style. Back when Altered Carbon was released, Morgan’s moody future-noir atmosphere and ultra-vivid imagery reminded me of Sprawl-trilogy-era William Gibson (except considerably darker and more violent), but fifteen years later I don’t think that comparison is entirely valid. In a nutshell, what you’re reading is the interior monologue of a classic Morgan anti-hero in all its darkly cynical glory, interspersed with snappy and often snarky dialogue, spectacularly violent action sequences, and the occasional graphic sex scene. There are a few parts that drag, especially towards the end, but the vast majority of the novel is fast-paced and hard to put down. For such a dark novel, it’s also surprisingly funny at times, with a few hilarious scenes and some phrases only Morgan could come up with. (Veil’s hacker friend—an unforgettable character all by himself—describes two people who keep popping up in the same place during his research as “stuck together in the data like tissues on a lap dance cabin floor.”)

Now Richard K Morgan has returned to the universe of Black Man/Thirteen, I hope he’ll stick around and turn these two novels into a trilogy at some point. There’s lots of room to explore in this universe, both literally (more planets have been colonized in the years between the two novels) and otherwise. I’d love a story with a bonobo (the third genetic variant frequently mentioned in the books) as a main character, but that’s probably unrealistic. Whatever happens, Thin Air is a worthy addition to Richard K. Morgan’s increasingly impressive bibliography. Recommended.

Thin Air slams out of the gate, throwing ultra-violence into a space-age noir that thrills on every page. With succinct writing and a brilliant grasp of the genre’s narrative form, Morgan has created a book that demands to be read. This isn’t the pristine Mars from your imagination. It’s a run-down, crime-laden den of iniquity, wrought with scandals and juicy secrets. That’s what makes it so fun to experience.

There’s a lot to enjoy from Richard K. Morgan’s latest novel. There is no exposition or build-up to the action. From page one, our protagonist Veil hits the ground running, taking down bad guys left and right. The dialogue is brilliantly rendered, the characters are a group of stressed out, pissed off Martians just trying to make a living. The setting is complete grunge with scant traces of that new Mars glow.

Full review will be published at: https://reviewsandrobots.com/2018/10/29/thin-air-noir-grunge-on-mars/

Great book for Sci-fi lovers. Reminds me of Blade runner but it is much better. Great job and i hope i will see more books from this author.

Dense, description heavy prose that took me a few pages to get into. I do like noir thrillers and much science fiction and fantasy so I soon felt mostly up to speed. I like that the anti-hero used first person point of view as well. I could imagine a movie script being developed from this material.

I was so happy to read something new from Mr. Morgan, he really does 'dark and gritty' so well, I was drawn in from the start. The characters were engaging and the storyline was a rollercoaster ride of intrigue, a great read for readers who want their sci-fi to be a grittier side.

Like his 2002 hit “Altered Carbon”, this one is a great blend of detective noir and cyberpunk in a dystopian world. Instead of shipping a detective self to far planets by sleeving a digital personality into a receiving body, the future tech staged here on a colonial, terraformed Mars is in the realm of bioengineering, artificial intelligence implants, and nanotechnology. Instead of Tak in the earlier series, our similar hero here is Hak, short for Hakan Veil, and he is a weapon incarnate.

Veil has been genetically modified for heightened physical capabilities (like night vision and high octane combat modes) and implanted from infancy with an onboard military-grade AI he can dialog with internally and interact with through analytic displays projected onto his retina. This investment was made by a mega-corporation, Blond Vaisutis, specializing in corporate security, sort of a Haliburton of the future. For twenty years Veil worked for them as an “overrider”, an all-around agent for spying, covert operations, and violent countermeasures to any threat to profitable business from pirates, insurrections, or uppity local governments. But he made a costly mistake that incurred deaths and exposed the company to adverse political expose, for which he was fired and exiled to Mars. There he struggles against poverty to use his talents in private contracting.

His cybernetic make up requires Veil to undergo hibernation for four months out of a year. He has been able to buy a former spaceship escape pod with hibernation unit set up in a living block of living pods for the poor in the metropolis Bradley (sort of like Bruce Willis’ pad in the movie “The Fifth Element”). When he is revived, he runs “hot”, or on a hair-trigger, for violent solutions, which is part of his programming for decisive action like when a company ship is under attack. Thus, we get a little bit of a cartoonish Hulk aspect to our fallen superhero. His onboard AI, ‘Ris, tries to shape him toward more strategic and safe behavior with sarcastic goading and ironic nagging, but “her” military design makes whatever the current mission or contract top priority:

"She’s a Blond Vasuitis crisis management system; you can’t really blame her. OSIRIS—Onboard Situational Insight and Resource Interface Support. It’s her whole desoigned purpose to plan and oversee critical conflict situations, and with that comes a tacit enthusiasm for the fight. .. Where possible, an Osiris will prefer to avoid damage to high-value personal—they <u>are</u> company assets after all—and sometimes even to human beings in general, because it understands that large numbers of casualties can be a public relations nightmare. …Come the crunch, Osiris will always prefer murder and mayhem to failure.
I’d like to think I’m made a little differently, but deep down I suspect it isn’t true."

Our first experience with Veil upon waking up from hibernation is a bold murder of an organized crime figure who killed a woman he had saved from being collateral damage in the last job he did. Soon thereafter he unwinds with hot sex with a female neighbor in his “Pod-Park Heaven” abode. Crude revenge violence and wallowing in crude sex sets us on a squirmy path to what? The next phase quickly had me pushing down the “ucks” and the “icks” and blasting off to a “wow” ride. Like with James Ellroy’s post-war Los Angeles noir detective tales, I felt like taking a shower by the end of the run, but nonetheless I had to race through the pages.

Veil’s new case starts with a metro police Lieutenant, Nikki Chakana, using leverage of his arrest for the murder to get him to serve as contracted security for a key female auditor sent from Earth to investigate corruption in the colonial government. She serves the Governor Mulholland, whose interest in maintaining his beautiful (and profitable) wickedness calls for doing anything to keep Mars out from under the military boots of Earth:

<i> She’d be scurrying around like a ferrite bug in a mountain of rust … Plugging leaks, disappearing inconvenient evidence and witnesses, getting stories straight. Terraforming local conditions, in other words, into some shiny simulacrum of what the good people back on Earth apparently expected things to be like out here.
Good luck with that, Lieutenant.</i>

The particular auditor in his charge, Madison Madekwe, aims to look into corruption in the state-run lottery system in the more rural provinces where the last winner has disappeared and presumed killed. But these provincial regions of the “Uplands” are like the Wild West with respect to central government controlled, and besides the usual conflict and collaborations among factions like organized crime, local police and governments, and the corporations, there is a huge underclass of people with many aligned toward the revolutionary “Mars First” movement. At the same time that Veil slips home to gather some weapons, the auditor is kidnapped with expert slaughter of security forces and Veil’s home defense tech identifies a coming assault from two commandoes with a ship-killer missile and another with a a big-caliber automatic assault weapon.

Our hero survives with the wonderful application of his special skills, but all he gets is grief from Lt. Chakana:
<i>You think you could have left <u>something</u> for forensics? They’re having a hard time finding six organic molecules still stuck together down there.</i>

She doesn’t quite see the connection between the two events or recognize that both reflect military capabilities beyond any of his many known enemies or Mars First guerilla factions. I love the hyperbolic, Chandleresque speech Morgan creates for Veil:
"Look, you don’t send a crack audit team across 200 million kilometers of interplanetary space because you think someone needs a few close tips on colonial management. … This was a major crackdown in the making, and the knowledge was all over Mulholland’s face. He looked like a man being forced to choke down spoiled oysters in zero G."

The satisfying Gibsonian cyberpunk element of the tale comes from the coolness of our hero in the face of all the corrupt factions he has to deal with and the replication of his predecessor’s “Sprawl”, the richly detailed and multicultural urban underbelly of a dog-eat-dog world in a high-tech future. A pleasurable return to the human jungle captured so well the “Blade Runner” film take of P.K. Dick’s “Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” I passed on successor books by Morgan after “Altered Carbon” as I didn’t want a lesser repeat. After highly enjoying the recent Netflix production of the book, it was perfect timing to catch up with him in this thrilling new work.

This book was provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

Richard K Morgan has long been one of my favorite science fiction writers. This book marks his return to science fiction after writing a fantasy trilogy. That trilogy was pretty good, but I found it intrinsically less interesting than his science fiction work, so this new novel is a welcome return to form. Thin Air takes place in the same universe as Morgan’s last SF novel, THIRTEEN (US title; it was originally called BLACK MAN in the UK), but it is not a sequel; the two books are entirely independent from one another. Morgan pulls off a difficult feat in all his texts: he gives us a central character who is essentially an ultra-macho superman (due, in the sf novels, to different varieties of technological body enhancement, as well as character), yet combines this with a degree of sensitivity to social and political concerns that one would not usually expect in this subgenre. For instance, Veil, the narrator and protagonist here, is emphatically not in the least misogynistic, even though this usually comes with the territory of ultra-violence and frequent sexual opportunities. The women he meets have agency, and sometimes the sex is... just bad. All of Morgan’s sf novels have interesting takes on the way neoliberal economics and governance work, extrapolated into various futures. Here Morgan again pulls off an impressive and difficult feat: he is sufficiently clear-eyed not to gild the lilly to the slightest extent, but instead to present financial domination and corporate/governmental impositions without even the slightest hint of redemptiveness; he wants to give us neoliberal capitalism in its full feral horror, even to rub our noses in it. There is nothing in this world besides rich people, and the corporations and governments they control, willing to go to any degree of destruction, torture, murder, and oppression in order to augment their profits. There is no line between criminal corruption, grand political manipulation, and totalitarian control; they are all the same thing. Yet at the same time, he resists the all too common temptation whereby this would slide into total cynicism. Morgan suggests that the worst speculations of Machiavelli and Hobbes are correct in how they view politics; and yet he maintains a sense of outrage about it all. His protagonists enjoy perpetrating violence, and their skills are largely for sale to the highest bidder; they don’t really have the stubborn integrity of those hardboiled noir detectives in novels and movies of the mid 20th century; and yet they aren’t simply amoral monsters, but suggest that there is at least a slim hope of getting beyond the atmosphere of atrocities that they inhabit (and do their bit to perpetrate). In Thin Air, Veil doesn’t really have a conscience, and yet he remains convinced (even if he himself doesn’t quite understand why or how) that something better than given social world is still possible. I am being vague here to avoid spoilers; this pattern is one that we see in all of Morgan’s science fiction in different ways. I am not sure Thin Air is quite as good either as the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy (with its surprising meditations on the slim but not entirely in existent possibilities of socialist revolution in this neoliberal capitalist hell, or as Thirteen, with its fascinating meditation on the powers and limitations of genetic engineering as a technology of capitalist control; but it is still a powerful book because of the way it posits the worst, almost revels in it, and yet allows us to think about the possibilities of things being otherwise than the way the text depicts them... which I take to be Morgan’s overall accomplishment as an SF novelist.
It may sound as if I am describing Thin Air as a cyberpunk novel, but it’s not. Cyberpunk is long dead and gone, and this is what comes after: the deglamorized residue. Most specifically, Thin Air is about neocolonialism under neoliberal conditions, or about what has been called Combined and Uneven Development . It takes place on Mars, in the aftermath of the Earth attempt to populate a new world. Things are grim and rundown; despite over 200 (Earth) years of colonization, Mars is still a crappy place to live, though there is a lot of money to be made from exploiting it. Of course, this rundown state, with the project of terraforming having been abandoned, rather than a glorious new settlement, is what we can actually expect if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos ever should succeed in their projects for colonizing Mars. Capitalist cosmopolitanism always requires backwaters. Capitalism always needs to underdevelop the very places it milks or exploits for profit, and the people there are just collateral damage (if they aren’t among the very few who are joined with the corporations back in the center – Earth in this case – in skimming off the surplus). Veil, the protagonist of Thin Air, is a former corporate goon who now sells his labor (and the corporate implants for killing and surviving that the corporation didn’t manage to deprive him of when they got rid of him) as a mercenary to the highest bidder. It’s the only work he can get on Mars, and he doesn’t have the money to get back home to Earth. Under such circumstances, everything is a set-up of which we are right to be suspicious – every bit as suspicious as Veil himself is. The novel succeeds because it already anticipates, pre-empts, and discounts in advance whatever we might be tempted to think about it. The novel shows us that everything is in fact even worse than we were prepared to think; and in continually outrunning us in this way, it also earns the barest whiff of the possibility of an at least slightly less awful world with which it entices us, but withdraws from whenever we get too close.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

When I started reading this book, I had sort of forgotten who wrote it. It was abundantly clear to me that Richard K Morgan was the author about 10 pages in. The way he writes is extremely appealing to me. It feels gritty and kind of...pulled tight in a way that gives a lot of suspense and keeps me engaged. I was unfamiliar with this world when I started the book, so it took a bit of time to become acquainted with the way it works and the rhythm of it, but I didn't feel like I missed anything important in the beginning in my "acclimation phase." I really enjoyed the characters and felt like they were all very believable. The book had a bit of an Altered Carbon vibe in that there was a lot of mission-based excitement and intrigue with lots of surprises and shadow players waiting in the wings. Though there are thematic differences, this is a completely different story with different characters. I can say that I think you'd love this book if you are a fan of our friend Takeshi Kovacs. Overall, this is a good book, and I think you should read it!