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Broken Angels
First, a little background on the universe of Broken Angel. A few hundred years before the events in Altered Carbon, humanity discovers the technological remains of a space-faring species on Mars -- and naturally nicknames them Martians, even though it is clear Mars is not their home planet, just a colony. After decoding some of their technology and information, humanity begins moving out to the various worlds detailed in the Martian records.
The other big technological breakthrough is the ability to record a person's mind via a cortical stack implanted in the spine. This effectively abolishes death through injury or disease, as the stack can be recovered and the data stored -- and even downloaded into a new body, or 'sleeve.' It also makes Real Death, or the destruction of someone's cortical stack, a much more serious crime than mere organic damage.
Far from creating a technological utopia of plenty for everyone this tech-breakthrough, diaspora and near-freedom from death, leads to more revolutions, more killing, and more varied inventive ways of brutalising each other. New bodies, or sleeves, cost money and most people are unable to afford them, and are consequently kept "on stack." Raw, unfettered captialism is the way. Criminal behaviour gets you stacked for a number of years, and your body handed over to someone else. It also opens the way to such charming practises as virtual torture, with no hope of escape or death.
Takeshi Kovacs, born on the Harlan's World colony, is a former member of the Envoy Corps. A military branch that 'conditions' its members, effectively rewriting their personalities to make them better soldiers. The Envoy Corps are the most feared soliders of the Protectorate. The conditioning gives them iron emotional control, a lack of empathy, extra combat awareness, and skill at psychologically manipulating others. They also possess the ability to deal with being quickly and frequently re-sleeved when deployed into a combat situation via needlecast (a kind of hyperspace communication system) -- something that can, apparently, be quite traumatic for normal people.
Altered Carbon covered (in flashback) some of Kovacs' background story, and the reasons for his disillusionment and desertion from the Envoys; Broken Angels continues his story. After the events in Altered Carbon, Kovacs finds himself signed up to fight in a mercenary unit -- known as 'The Wedge' -- on the colony world of Sanction IV. Former Envoys are highly prized by commanders, and despite his distaste of command and responsibility, it pays the bills.
After being injured in a battle, Kovacs is approached by another soldier to get involved with the unofficial find of a Martian artifact ... one of the most extraordinary and potentially lucrative yet found. It's a race to claim ownership, against other ruthless corporations, betrayal, slow sleeve death due to radiation sickness (the Mandrake corporation engineers the nuking of a nearby city, just to clear out the area), and killer nanotechnology.
Like Altered Carbon, Broken Angels is a brutal read in parts. It doesn't flinch from the horrific things people do to each other, and is spectacularly inventive in thinking up ever more horrendous methods of punishment and interrogation. It throws in voodoo, 'soul markets' where dead soliders' stacks are sold, and an anatomiser -- a machine designed for a horrible ritual punishment in The Wedge.
While I enjoyed Altered Carbon, I thought it almost too much of a teenage-boy fantasy novel: An almost unstoppable bad-ass who can deal with anything, but is basically a good guy at heart; the almost fetishistic descriptions of weapons and gleefully detailed battles and brawls. It's all good stuff; well written and inventive, but a bit limited (except for the Jimmy de Soto hallucinations, which I thought were excellent). It was saved by its imaginative technology, hard SF speculation and clever detective story twists. Broken Angels seems a bit more mature. There is still the gleeful descriptions of battles, but the surrounding characters seem more fleshed out. 'Broken Angels' is no character-driven, emotionally deep masterpiece -- but it is a page-turner which neatly combines fast-paced action, imaginative technology and plot twists.
A quick note for any British readers who remember when the Conservatives (the traditional party of the Right) were in power: In the novel, the current whiney political officer of Kovacs' Wedge unit is called Lamont (he's been deliberately addicted to wire to keep him quiet), and the previous one was Portillo (he was regularly beaten, also to keep him quiet). It's a safe bet that Morgan is not a card-carrying member of the Conservative Party.
You can purchase Broken Angels from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Seriously, that's what it said before the link was fixed.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The whole "cortical stack" thing sounds like the Endimion portion of Dan Simmons' "Hyperion/Endimion" cycle of books. Although, from the sounds of it, this doesn't go off on the same religious bent.
Does anybody who's read Simmons' stuff and the reviews book care to comment? If you liked Hyperion and liked the reviewed books as well, was it because of similarities?
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
Do you think Gollancz is going to take issue with the cybersquatter owners of brokenangels.com?
It is a slow news day. When I see crap like this get posted- my slashdot rejections sting twice as much.
Well, that's one surefire way of putting this Darl McBride / SCOX scam to rest permanently. Someone explain to me where the problem is?
Not award winning, but it moved along at a nice pace and was generally entertaining.
I sure hope it has nothing to do with the TV Series...
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
It was a good novel, very Indiana Jones-like. Unfortunately, Morgan got into the habit of putting periods in odd places. His characters. Started talking. Like this.
Bugged me.
Other than that, a fun novel.
Moo.
Any relation to Walter Kovacs?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ever since Altered Carbon I've been REALLLY wanting this guy to write more books. My brother got me a first edition signed copy of Angels from the UK a while back. It was a departure from Altered but it also showed that this character and the world he lives in has many excellent posibilities. I'm hooked.
I just want him to write more.
So I bought "Market forces" -- and have never been so disappointed in my life.
It was like religious writing from the Bible belt with Chomsky as Jesus. Where idealism and propaganda go in not only reason and integrity go out -- but also fun and interesting literature. :-(
When you write the above aboue "Broken Angels", does it mean this book has also been seduced by the author's political opinions to write about conspiracy theories about why the present society is just a capitalist stalinism?
(No, I'm not a fanatic -- I really like most of MacLeod's books, for instance. I just have a dislike like for Believers, no matter the religion.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I haven't read "Broken Angels", but I have read his previous novel, "Altered Carbon". It was decent, but not what I would call great scifi. It had a few scifi concepts, thrown into a basic detective plot. It felt more like a hollywood screenplay.. lots of action around a basic mystery, with scifi concepts that could quickly be explained in the story.
For a much better scifi work, with a lot of though t provoking concepts, check out "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. He has a similar concept of taking human consciousness into an electronic form. But, Egan covers it much more thoroughly.
Has this just been released in the US? I remember when 'Altered Carbon' was reviewed in Slashdot, this new book was already out in the UK.
For my two penneth - Broken Angels wasn't as good as the first, but an enjoyable change none the less.
Altered Carbon was a truly astounding debut novel, but I felt that Broken Angels was just the same book again. I couldn't possibly comment on which is better, as my tendency will be to favour the one which I read first, but the two books are very comparable. Michael Marshall Smith, however, is a different kettle of fish. All of his pre-2003 stuff is essential reading to anyone who likes the scent of that which they call cyberpunk to rise from the pages.
My other processor is big-endian.
I'm partway through Altered Carbon right now, and I'm enjoying it for what it is, which is a cyberpunk-inspired thriller rather than what I consider "true" science fiction.
I found it interesting, and somehow disappointing, that the premise of this story relies on the "needlecast", which is just this author's renaming of the ansible, which is Ursule K. le Guin's/Orson Scott Card's method of transmitting data faster than light throughout the universe. With it, a digitized person can be transmitted from one colonized system to another instantaneously; without it, space travel is hardly improved.
Why is this a problem for me? I don't know, exactly. Ansibles are no more or less possible (based on known science) than digitizing the entire human mind. Maybe I just don't like my sci-fi to assume more than one impossible thing at a time.
and I liked them both for different reasons. Mainly that's because they are different genre of books. Altered Carbon is a straight-ahead detective story with some great technology thrown in. Broken Angels is more sci-fi'ish, slower paced, and not a mystery at all. So if you look at them as being two stand-alone novels that happen to share a character, you'll be a lot happier. I'll admit it took me a bit longer to get through Broken Angels, though it's been long enough since I read either of them that I can't remember specifically why. It just seems to drag a bit near the end.
Damn Open Source zealots!!!!
I enjoyed both Altered Carbon and Broken Angels very much. The Science Fiction was hard enough to keep my attention and I did enjoy the detective style of the books.
However I feel the author is painting a bigger canvas than these two books. If you read both the books together you can see interesting themes developing (as one poster said the Martians, but I don't want to drop any spoilers).
I'm hoping for much more out of a series of related books - thats always my favourite when the series adds up to more than the sum of its parts!
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
What is "wire"? The review speaks of it at the end, but...aside from the literal meaning of it, WTF.
Loved 'Altered Carbon', and I'm delighted a sequel is being made.
Fair warning for folks interested in the series though: The torture scenes get gruesome, almost to the point of Piers Anthony's "On The Uses Of Torture" short story.
Being body-swapped into the body of a young woman, on her period, and then being tied down and having your feet slowly blowtorched off.
Yeah. Reader beware. If you can tolerate the gruesome scenes, however, the book is excellent. And from the sounds of it, so is the sequel.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Just a quickie - please be merciful!
Please can all you sci-fi fans please suggest your favourite 3 books of that genre. With a tilt towards the soft of book you think someone who likes fiction and science but has read only a little sci-fi. I've heard about 'hard sci-fi' and it sounds interesting. I don't mind if it's pretty weird.
... and he wants his novel back.
he has written a new book - it's out in the UK right now - it's called Market Forces and it's pretty interesting. A few weird concepts - death races - but overall a good, somewhat surprising, ending.
No Takeshi Kovacs though. He does make an oblique reference to himself re: memory stacks in the book though. See the Amazon UK website for more info.
Peter F. Hamilton's stuff is all also very very worth reading. The Night's Dawn stuff especially. Tons of great pulp reading for a bored geek.
If you like Richard Morgan's writing even a little, you will want to check out Market Forces.
:)
It's set in a different universe to his first two... a post-apocalyptic England mainly.
When I picked it up, I was quite concerned that it was going to be a straight rip off of Mad Max, but it kept me interested all the way through.
Hell, how can any book that starts off with a quote from a Midnight Oil song NOT be good
It was the quality of writing that made Altered Carbon so good in my eyes. it felt like each sentence had been carefully crafted and was the first sci-fi book I had read in a long time that had been really well written (from a literary perspective). Broken Angels and Market forces however read like they had been rushed to meet deadlines, this didn't make them bad books, just a little dissapointing after the first.
Keep your programs tidy.
Exitzero.
Mr Banks? Anyone reading Iain (with or without the 'M') Banks out there? Protganists awaken, live and die in a cyber-construct shielding from the realities of the universe. Live and die five times in the first half of the first chapter!
One thing that I found curious about the character is that despite having a well-developed moral system, he seems capable of acts of tremendous violence. He is almost sociopathic in that regard, as he doesn't seem to have the emotional mechanisms which restrain him. This per se is not unusual in humans, but I'd expect it to be accompanied by some distortions in the rest of his psyche - but they are not there. Mostly (not entirely ) he is well adjusted, but once he is engaged in combat he nearly always goes for the most violent solution available.
Envoy programming? Aftereffects of being in combat for a long time? Not sure.
I've only read Altered Carbon so far, but he did talk about some of the questions with digitizing the human mind. For example, the Catholics were very much against being brought back in another sleeve if your original body died. Also, Takeshi encountered an assassin which illegally duplicated himself into two different sleeves. (The assassin didn't trust anyone but "himself" as a partner. The second sleeve was a woman though, a theme which came up later during a virtual torture scene.)
The first book was excellent. An accessable cyber-punk with great film nior undertones. Much more accessable then Gibson. The second book looses the great film nior feel, and the authors lack of being able to describe fast paced events comes back a little worse. Over all a great sophmore effort. The first book was better, hopefully he can find his voice again and tell us more about the man known as Kovacks
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
nt
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
Sounds exactly like the kind of book I would not like to buy.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I sort of enjoyed parts of these books, but I have to say, the gruesome fixation on extreme levels of violence and torture turned me off. I've wallowed in enough Genet and Burroughs in my day to have a strong stomach about these things, but I get the feeling that Morgan is merely sensationalistic about the unpleasant content in his books. Particularly, the extreme ugliness just seemed to be there to
:-)
1) justify massive amounts of violence on the part of the protagonists as a reasonable retaliation (a tacky device not unfamiliar to anyone who watches action movies these days),
and
2) Open up a reasonable amount of territory so that the 'tortured, morally ambiguous heroes' can seem like they're in some sort of decent middle ground; just by making the bad guys really, really bad. Err, no, you don't achieve moral complexity by making the bad guys 20 times as bad so that the good guy can still be a real asshole and still seem like a decent guy in the end.
There are a lot of more worthwhile books out there (although not much recent science fiction that isn't retarded, which is a criticism that I would _not_ levy at these books). Ultimately, if you like cheap, nasty thrills, you'll love these books. Enjoy, you sick bastards...
(alternately, read Iain M. Banks, who is well above this guy in the food chain even if he has some similar issues of his own to work out)
I had no expectations for Altered Carbon, but it was an excruciating read. I honestly don't know why I bothered to finish it.
First of all, it barely qualifies as scifi. It's more of a bad Hollywood (option-me-please!) mystery thriller with tacked-on, unoriginal science fiction elements. A lot of the dialog is so awkward that I was literally cringing while reading it.
The only thing I got out of Altered Carbon was a strong desire to avoid any of the author's other work.
lol
takeshi is a japanese name
kovacs is hungarian
this information is not important tho
conditioning gives them iron emotional control, a lack of empathy, extra combat awareness, and skill at psychologically manipulating others
Both highlighted assertions are mutually incompatible.
It doesn't help!
"physochological"? It's got almost the same edit distance from "physiological" as it has to "psychological". I would take it to be a neologism of the author, but for the fact that you spelled "neural" incorrectly!
I almost never complain about spelling, but this is ridiculous; which of the three did you mean?