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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.
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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?
Not award winning, but it moved along at a nice pace and was generally entertaining.
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.
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.
> A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge.
I'll check them out on Amazon shortly.
>Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Amazing.
Huh - I typed, then deleted, a comment about that being pretty much the only current sci-fi book I'd read, and I thought that it was pretty good but a touch overrated by people online, to be honest. A slight anti-climax. I didn't like all that religious stuff, but I did like the atmosphere he managed to create - like a stylised cartoon (The Powerpuff Girls, Ren and Stimpy).
About 10 years ago I read and diskliked a couple of Gibson books (Neuromancer and Count Zero, I think). I thought the Watchmen was good, althought that's not really a novel, which is sort of what I meant.
Early Gibson is tough to read. Give him another shot with Pattern Recognition, and if you like it, Idoru. His writing style has come a long way.
;) It's not live yet, but it will be very soon (less than a week) and if you like what you see, feel free to join.
I don't normally pimp my site in a comment, but you might want to bookmark my new review site (as seen in my sig) so that you can find more sci-fi books. The initial group I have is very sci-fi friendly.
Moo.
It's not a different universe, just set several hundred years before. Market Forces mentions the fact that humans have reached Mars, implying that they haven't yet found the alien technology.
The development of the corporations (as a result of a series of 'domino' recessions rather than a post-apocalyptic event) seems to be the precursor to the corporations within his first two books. Even at the earlier time of Market Forces the corporations are wielding considerable power and openly manipulating governments.
On the whole, Market Forces is a good read, once you have put the authors world views to one side - The dedication gives ample warning that it may not be a balanced view of global corporations when it says:
"It's also dedicated to all those, globally, whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out by the Great Neoliberal Dream and Slash-and-Burn Globalisation".
Regarding the Mad Max fears (which also raised their heads with me before I bought the book); the author does cite "a rather obvious debt of inspiration" to both Mad Max and Rollerball.
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.
Despite the type of character Takeshi Kovacs is, I can help but like him, but really thats what anti-hereos are about, we relate to them because they get to do the things that we would like to do in similar situations. Takeshi is certainly not forgiving when he is wronged, but we feel sympathy towards him because of the hardships he has had to endure, even those he has brought onto himself.