Miscalculation: A Noir Tale of Skull Morgan
The Entrypoint novellas in the Simon Vector series are a lot of fun. I’ve always been a sucker for backstory — for details that make a character seem more real. To me, every time you see a character in a novel, it should feel as if that person had a life before you encountered them, and will go on to have a life after you have left them (unless you see them die, of course). A novel is a window into a moment of existence in the lives of multiple people, and as you know from real life, people are complex. Every one of them has a saga, be it dull or interesting, sordid or inspiring.
The novellas Correction and Corruption were a horror tale and a sci-fi Western, respectively. They gave us the backstories of Gerald Ruhming, a minor but important villain in the full-length novel Simon Vector, and Jayson Boothe, an imperial marshal whose story touches on that of Ruhming’s (and who makes what is essentially a cameo appearance in Simon Vector). Each story ends with the character in prison on Alpha Draconis, the setting of the full-length novel. Each of these three stories can be read in any order, independently of each other. Together they build a complex, dystopian, and corrupt future world whose central message could easily be, “People will screw you.”
Never is that more apparent than in Miscalculation: A Noir Tale of Skull Morgan. With the third novella in the Simon Vector Entrypoint series, a pattern that could have been coincidence now emerges as obvious. I am not telling you anything you do not already know by saying that the novella ends with Skull Morgan in prison on Alpha Draconis. He has to end up there for the novel to occur. But who is Skull Morgan? What are his motivations? How did he end up in a prison largely reserved for murderers and serial rapists, when he is clearly much more intelligent than most of the other inmates?
Miscalculation answers those questions, and in the process paints a picture of a rogue and schemer who is actually very likable in his own way. Knowing Morgan’s ultimate fate, it is almost a shame to see him in his element. He has so much potential and will fall so far that watching him do it is almost a tragedy. I say “almost” because, ultimately, Morgan’s own actions are the cause of his undoing, and watching him get where he must go is the essence of a noir crime thriller like this one.
