Richard K. Morgan

Takeshi Kovacs — (2002-2005) Publisher: In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning...

Altered Carbon

Roughly 500 years in the future, death becomes avoidable. Initially used as a method for deep space travel, a person’s consciousness can be digitally stored for an indefinite amount of time and then downloaded into a “cortical stack” of an unoccupied human body or “sleeve.” However, the procedure does require financial means, and even then only the very rich can get their original body back. This scientific breakthrough, along with space travel, true A.I., virtual reality, biological enhancement, cloning, and other technological advances, haven’t served to better mankind as much as further complicated it. Class separation is even more extreme, now that the prosperous have several lifetimes to increase their power. Religious factions oppose man-made immortality. Meanwhile, generations are born and re-sleeved on distant planets while Earth is slowly becoming a relic.

To help maintain control of colonies at the farthest reaches of the galaxy, the UN Protectorate created shock troops called the Envoys, which deploy by instantaneous galactic digital transfer into waiting cortical stacks of bio-enhanced sleeves. The Envoys are elite combat soldiers and counter-intelligence operatives feared throughout the known universe, and Takeshi Kovacs used to be one of them.

A wealthy businessman, Laurens Bancroft, was recently murdered and had to be re-sleeved. With the police claiming his death was suicide, Bancroft needs the best to find his killer. Kovacs is the best, so Bancroft arranges to have him transported to Earth.

Altered Carbon is an action-packed, who-done-it mystery that hooked me to the very end. I state with the utmost respect that my mind imagined visuals of the movie Blade Runner as I read it. (After all, Mr. Morgan has made the comparison himself.) Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and Altered Carbon’s San Francisco could exist in the same future. Rick Deckard and Takeshi Kovacs could be brothers, though Kovacs would be the mean brother that beat up on Deckard when they were kids.

The technological advances in Altered Carbon are mindboggling and believable at the same time. The vision of the future, although grim, is so relatable to our current world that it’s easy to accept as reality. Woes that have always plagued mankind, like class separation, abuse of power, and the conflict between government and religion, continue and become more extreme.

Despite incredible scientific achievements being crucial elements to the story, Altered Carbon has the mood and excitement of a crime thriller that just happens to be set in the far future. And the voice of Takeshi Kovacs’ narration increases that ambiance.

True to the story’s tone Kovacs is the classic noir private-eye, only increased tenfold. Though haunted by the violence of his past, Kovacs is ready, willing, and capable to react with violent action whenever necessary, or maybe just because he’s pissed off. On the surface, Kovacs may seem lawless and self-serving but he lives by his own code and is a man of his word.

Richard K. Morgan has the deep understanding of human nature and society that the best authors have. Without distracting from the story, he raises profound questions about what it is that makes a person who they are. Is it the physical body, mind, memories, or is it truly all those things combined? And if that is the case, if just one of those elements gets changed, is a different individual created? However, one thing is certain: in Altered Carbon, being immortal doesn’t make life any easier.

Morgan impressed me even more with his ability to bring written words to life. The perception of Earth being an antiquated remnant of human history weighs like a constant dark shadow. The sexual interludes are more erotic than an evening spent in a high-end strip club. I would’ve given up any secret asked when just reading about a character being interrogated by torture. Because Kovacs’ sleeve was a smoker, his constant struggle with that habit made me crave a cigarette, and I haven’t smoked seriously in over twenty years.

Wherever Takeshi Kovacs goes, Hell is sure to follow and so will I. I had such a great time with Richard K. Morgan’s book that along with the rest of the KOVACS novels, I’ll be checking out his sword & sorcery series, A LAND FIT FOR HEROES. —Greg Hersom

Altered Carbon

Richard K Morgan’s Altered Carbon, the first Takeshi Kovacs novel, is a roller-coaster ride. Morgan cycles us through traditional science-fiction, some mean-streets detective drama and a fine caper story before the book ends, all told by Kovacs himself, a disillusioned killer, a futuristic Sam Spade only slightly less dirty than the dirty business he’s in, a battered knight in tarnished armor.

In Altered Carbon’s future world, science has given humanity the ability to digitize consciousness and store it in a tiny canister embedded in a vertebra at the base of the skull. What is stored in these “cortical stacks” lasts indefinitely and can be decanted into a virtual reality or “sleeved” into a clone or any vacant human body. This technology was refined for intergalactic space travel but has now spread to everyday life.

Takeshi Kovacs, a citizen of Harlan’s World, has just had his consciousness squirted across the galaxy and “sleeved” into a body on Old Earth, where he has been hired by Laurens Bancroft, a very wealthy man, to solve Bancroft’s murder. Recently, someone shot Bancroft in the head with a blaster, destroying his cortical stack. Of course Bancroft has himself backed up, but it’s the principle of the thing. He needs to know who attacked him.

Awakening in a new body in San Francisco, Kovacs’s first encounter is with the police, particularly Kristin Ortega, a tough, sexy, street-smart cop with an interest in Kovacs. In short order he meets his employer, in a scene reminiscent of the conservatory scene in The Big Sleep, and his employer’s hot and treacherous wife Miriam.

The action starts as soon as Kovacs checks into his hotel, the Hendrix. We often say that a city or a building is a character. The Hendrix, managed by an artificial intelligence, really is a character, with its own concerns and motivations, and it is cautiously willing to help Kovacs. It protects him after he is attacked in the lobby, an incident that pings Kovacs’s highly developed intuition.

Kovacs is not merely an investigator. He is an ex-Envoy. Envoys are specially trained and highly conditioned intergalactic shock troops, deployed to keep the colonial planets in line. Because they can be dropped into any body, they can function as covert ops, spies, or traditional military troops as needed. Kovacs is on his own on Old Earth, up against institutionalized corruption, big money, planetary politics and enemies from both his own past and the past of the “sleeve” he wears. Ortega’s interest in him is suspicious, and he knows he’s not getting the whole story from his employer, while Miriam Bancroft has an agenda of her own. Kovacs takes the fight to the bad-guys, inflicting Real Death (cortical stack destruction) on the entire staff of a black-market clinic after the clinic’s director accepts money to have Kovacs tortured.

Torture is a big part of this book. It is threatened, it is carried out, and it is discussed philosophically. One character opines that with the advent of the stack, death as a threat has lost its meaning, so torture is the only viable alternative. Kovacs himself seems to refute this argument later when he muses than most people do not “re-sleeve” more than once, because they don’t want to have to experience death again. Torture seems to be one way the author demonstrates that in this society, human life has little value.

Morgan is a master of brutal, hard-edged action. Fight scenes and torture sequences are realistic enough to make the reader flinch. He also writes convincingly graphic, vigorous sex scenes. The plot is convoluted but Morgan has control of it at every step.

The cortical stack is a brilliant gimmick that allows for lots of flashy stunts, in virtual worlds and in the material one. Still, I have never understood exactly what is stored in them. Kovacs theorizes that identity is nothing more than the sum of memories, but Morgan carefully critiques that idea as the story progresses. Kovacs is more than the sum of his memories. I also don’t understand why women are treated as badly as they are in Altered Carbon’s world. One villain says that humanity is now the cheapest and most renewable resource (the example is that it is cheaper to kill an actual prostitute in a “snuff scenario” than it is to program one in virtual); yet it is women who are bought, sold, degraded, raped, mutilated and killed. To put a fine point on it, the torturers decant Kovacs into a virtual female form before torturing him, and the torture has a nasty sexual slant. The book is also filled with strong women characters, like Ortega, who take control of their own fates, and throughout the book Kovacs thinks about Quellcrist Falconer, a briefly successful female revolutionary from Harlan’s World. Morgan is making a point about the value of life and the feminine principle, but there’s just too much going on in this book to allow that theme the attention it needs.

If you appreciate thrilling, brutal action sequences, graphic sex, imaginative high-tech hijinks, snappy dialogue and wry humor, you will enjoy Altered Carbon. Although Kovacs is not necessarily likeable, you may find he grows on you. I did. —Marion Deeds  

Broken Angels

Thirty years after the events in Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs hires on with Carrera's Wedge, a mercenary outfit contracted by the government-supported corporations to fight against revolutionaries on the distant planet Sanction IV. Kovacs is a former Envoy — one of the elite covert ops commandos feared throughout known space. So, like it or not, all-out military conflict is what Kovacs does best. However, he has become bone-weary of the stalemate that is only serving to greatly increase the body count. So when a pilot approaches Kovacs with tales of a Martian artifact that can instantaneously transport people and things to the edges of the universe, he seizes on a way out with a huge pay-off as an added bonus. Kovacs finagles Matthias Hand, a high executive with the Mandrake Corporation, to get financial backing for a clandestine mission to recover the ancient, alien star-gate. Kovacs and Hand purchase a team of specialized soldiers for the job from the “Soul Market” and initiate plans. But just who is working for whom? Who are the good guys? Is there even such a thing as the good guys? Just what the hell will Kovacs and his team discover and, most importantly, will anyone make it out alive?

Where Altered Carbon was a neo-noir mystery, Broken Angels is military science fiction. Still, Broken Angels has the same dark, edgy feel as that first TAKESHI KOVACS novel. The technologies that Mr. Morgan first explains in Altered Carbon continue to be a key element of this series. Technological and scientific advances that should improve quality of life only grant those in authority more power over the masses. Science has defeated death, but immortality has made human life into little more than an abundant commodity. That life is cheap is a heavy theme throughout the story.

Landscapes littered with dusty colossal industrial hulks, oppressive corporations, ultra-deadly military weaponry, globe-encompassing war, and weird alien relics are all elements that serve to create a grim far-future for mankind. The realization that the universe is full of unknown terrors that can at any moment swallow us up like we never existed is horrifying.

There isn’t a single character in this story that I could say is likable. It’s almost unsettling how Morgan can still make them charismatic. Takeshi Kovacs himself frowns — just a little bit — on the senselessness of wholesale slaughter but won’t hesitate to kill and kill again. Although they are in a shaky alliance, Matthias Hand serves as Kovacs’ nemesis in this book. As the ultimate corporate ass, Hand would be a character that I have personal reasons to hate, but he becomes one of my favorites in the book. Almost all the team members have intriguing personalities and pasts that lend unique perspectives to the events.

Broken Angels might be righteously accused of overkill. Multiple climactic events slightly confuse the flow, as if it’s really two books instead of one. The casualty rate may make it a contender for a fiction world record. Don’t ask me who the good guys are, because I’m still not sure. The biggest hurdle Broken Angels may have is that it’s just so dark that many readers may find it depressing. However, this reader didn’t have any of those problems.

So what if it reads a little like it’s more than one book? What can I say? Broken Angels is a bargain. Planet-wide warfare with futuristic weapons and the ability to bring 90% of dead soldiers back to life would make the violence unimaginable. Personally, I think good guys are overrated — but if one is needed, I choose Kovacs. True, he’s in my top five list of the most pissed-off fictional characters of all time, but he’s got good reason. Plus, you have to admire a man that sticks to a code of honor, even if it’s his own, slightly skewed one.

Regarding the pervasive doom-and-gloom in Broken Angels, I managed to find a candle-flicker in the blackness. Just like in Altered Carbon, Morgan sneaks in profound musings about what it is to be human. I took heart in finding that even in our grim far-flung future, when science can deliver what only religion promised before, faith survives. Many of the people in this story still believe in a supreme being and take comfort in that knowledge. Kovacs may or may not buy into it himself, but with his authority issues, his opinions are understandable.

Besides, how can you not love a guy who sticks it to the man every chance he gets? —Greg Hersom

Broken Angels

Three weeks ago I finished Broken Angels, the second book in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy. I’ve been struggling with this review ever since. Broken Angels is good noir science fiction. It is well-written. I just didn’t like it.

In some places in the book the timbers of the plot show through the flash-and-dazzle, but that is no more than a nuisance. Kovacs is a believable character in a complicated and exciting situation. The world, Sanction IV, is not well drawn at all, and that is deliberate. Sanction IV’s civil war is is just One More War on One More World. The planet’s people, its history, its culture and its future don’t matter to the people Kovacs works for, or to Kovacs himself for that matter.

On medical leave from the government-sponsored military, Kovacs is drawn into a scheme to claim an alien artifact, a starship parked in orbit around the planet. To pursue this prize, Kovacs goes AWOL, sort of, frees a local archeologist from an internment camp for dissidents, and makes a pitch to a “lean and hungry” corporation to bankroll the expedition.

As he unrolls this adventure for us, Morgan juggles a number of serious themes: corporate interests and war; academia and religion; the mind-body split; and the impact of genetic engineering. Published in 2003, Broken Angels struggles with some of the same questions Paolo Bacigalupi addressed in The Windup Girl. How do you know if your insight, your impulse, is coming from “you,” or just your programming? If you are conscious of your conditioning, can you overcome it? If you are a product of conditioning, do you really have free will?

Kovacs has two levels of conditioning; the genetic tags in the cloned body or “sleeve” that he wears, and the deeper, permanent Envoy conditioning which actually changed his consciousness (or, as Kovacs subversively refers to it, his soul). Consciousness in this universe resides as digital code in a cylinder embedded at the base of a person’s skull. This “cortical stack” can be retrieved from any piece of dead meat and installed in another “sleeve.” Where Kovacs is from, clothes do not make the man.

In an early scene in Broken Angels, Kovacs goes to a “Soul Market,” where shoppers can buy cortical stacks by the pound. There’s a war on, killing soldiers and civilians alike, and cortical stacks are piled up in huge bins, waiting for someone with enough interest or money to re-sleeve them. The stacks are tarnished and grotty, with bits of spine still clinging to them. It’s a vivid scene. Well, done, Mr Morgan! Human life is worthless! We get it.

After he reconstitutes a group of soldiers, Kovacs leads the expedition to the alien portal that opens into space, where the starship waits. This is one area where you can see the author forcing the plot. “Oh, no, someone sabotaged our salvage beacon! We’ll have to go through the portal and install a beacon on the ship manually.” Dude, it’s an alien starship! Did anyone think for two seconds that your characters weren’t going to explore it?

They do explore the ship and this part of the story is wonderful. Then they are captured by the military. The last third of the book is a prison break. One of the team is tortured to death, but off-stage, so the reader hears his screams as the rest of the team discusses escape options.

Even with glitches, Broken Angels works well as an adventure. Morgan also does a good job of imparting information that will help the reader understand things in Woken Furies, the final book of the set. In the first book Altered Carbon, I developed some sympathy for Kovacs as he tried to do a couple of tiny things to change the balance of power in a stacked-deck world. In Angels, Kovacs is the one doing the stacking. He spends most of this book fighting down his impulses toward decency. Am I wrong for wanting the decency to win, just once, just for contrast?

I’m giving the book three stars because I think that Morgan achieved his goals. The book is well done, just not to my taste. He has created a credible dystopian future, and while I can quibble about gaps and inconsistencies, for the most part it works. If you like military science fiction, cool gadgets, virtual sex and alien starships, there is a lot to enjoy in Broken Angels. —Marion Deeds  

Woken Furies

Back on his home planet of Harlan’s World, Takeshi Kovacs is trying to mind his own business — which happens to be a personal open season on the priests of a fanatical religion. However, he soon becomes a target of the Yakuza, hiring on with some machine-killing mercenaries, on the outs with the ruling family, in bed with a resurrected legendary rebel prophet, and throwing in with surfer revolutionaries, all while being hunted by a younger version of himself. Despite being so darned adorable Kovacs just can’t get an even break, but he does kind of bring it on himself.

Woken Furies is Richard K. Morgan’s third and latest TAKESHI KOVACS novel. Raw-edged violence, graphic sex, and bad attitudes continue to be a mainstay of this series. (Can you say awesome?) Altered Carbon is still my favorite but Woken Furies comes in as a very close second. Without risking a spoiler, I will say the conclusion of Woken Furies is the most satisfying of the three books.

If you’ve read the proceeding TAKESHI KOVACS novels, you already know that the most crucial element of this series is the technology that allows a person’s consciousness to be uploaded into a “cortical stack” which in turn can been implanted into another vacant body or “sleeve.” As long as a person has the means to acquire their next sleeve and as long as their cortical stack remains intact, they will never die. What makes Mr. Morgan’s take on immortality different is that except for the extremely wealthy who can afford to be cloned, there’s no telling who, or sometimes what, someone will be “re-sleeved” as. This makes for intriguing twists because Takeshi changes bodies like we do cars. Sometimes he gets a top-of-the-line, high-performance model. Other times, his sleeve is just something he’s stuck with until he can do better.

Kovacs has got to be one of the angriest and self-loathing characters in fiction. He racks up a body count that rivals CONAN THE BARBARIAN. If that’s not enough incentive to stay off his bad side, Kovacs makes revenge an art form of which he is the master. Just like the Pale Rider of the apocalypse, where Takeshi Kovacs goes, Hell follows.

Harlan’s World is a very interesting setting with its high ocean-to-land ratio and ancient Martian satellites that blast most everything out of the sky. The largest landmass on Harlan’s World is currently uninhabitable due to evolving artificially intelligent machines which mercenaries called deComs make a good, but dangerous, living destroying. Not to mention that the planet’s three moons make for a courageous — or maybe suicidal — surfers’ paradise. Three centuries previous, after a failed revolution, the all-powerful Protectorate granted the rule of the entire planet to the Harlan family, who has a truce of sorts with the rampant criminal underworld. Also a twisted religion — much like the beliefs of al Qaida — has been growing steadily. And this is Takeshi Kovacs’ hometown. Add that to an abusive father and it’s no wonder he’s so screwed up.

While Kovacs’ antisocial behavior, violent tendencies, and authority issues may make him self-destructive and a danger to society, they make one helluva a dark adventure for readers. Kovacs holds a special place in my jaded heart. —Greg Hersom

Woken Furies

Takeshi Kovacs spends most of Woken Furies, the third book in the Kovacs series, in a bad mood. Kovacs is an ex-Envoy, a carefully selected, highly trained, rigidly conditioned assassin for the powerful and draconian Protectorate, so when he’s in a bad mood, people usually die.

Of course, many of them are not really dead, or rather, Really Dead, because people in Richard K. Morgan’s future universe have cortical stacks, shiny storage devices attached to their cervical vertebrae, holding consciousness. As long as your cortical stack is undamaged, your consciousness can just be downloaded into a new physical body, called a “sleeve.” While you’re waiting for a sleeve your consciousness can be dormant, or it might be active, inserted into a virtual environment. This could be a paradise or a torture chamber, depending upon who got hold of your stack.

Each book in the series can stand alone, with one or two overarching storylines, mostly focused on a 300-years-Really Dead revolutionary named Quellcrist Falconer, and the peculiar Martian satellites that orbit Harlan’s World, the planet where Kovacs was born. The discovery of Martian artifacts, the decoding of their technology and their astro-charts propelled humanity off Earth and into space, on the trail of already terra-formed planets. Presumably, this jump to space pushed the cloning and the development of the magical soul-amulets, oops, sorry, cortical storage devices. It isn’t clear where all the sleeves come from, whose genetic material is being harvested for the sleeves, or even how people who decide they want to have a child are choosing to do that now that consciousness and identity have been irrevocably sundered from DNA. What does this do to inheritance laws, since there is no way to use DNA tracking to verify identity once a person has shifted bodies?

There’s not much discussion about how this triumph of Calvinistic mind-body split affected people psychologically or spiritually. These aren’t Doris Lessing novels. They are a cross between military science fiction and dystopian SF–SF noir.

For that sub-genre, this video-game trope with its endless supply of spare lives works well. Morgan has done a great job of establishing the legacy of the Martian technology, although it helped that I had read the previous books first. The Martian machines that orbit Harlan’s World, where Kovacs has returned, are intriguing and deadly, since they vaporize any airborne craft that gets more than a certain distance above sea level. There is only one place on the planet where shuttles to the star ships can land and take off, presumably because the satellites allow it. No one knows why the orbitals do this; sometimes, arbitrarily, the orbitals shoot at other things. Nobody controls the orbitals; nobody knows how.

Kovacs is pursuing a scheme of personal vengeance when he connects with a group of DeComs, soldiers for hire who decommission smart weapons left on the planet’s war-ravaged lost continent. He’s also dodging the local yakuza. Soon he realizes that one of the DeComs appears to be channeling the consciousness of the long-dead revolutionary. Then he finds out that the yakuza clan has sleeved a backup copy of himself, to hunt him down.

Woken Furies has plenty of suspense and Morgan’s action sequences hum with intensity. The action moves from the lost continent to the planetary capital to a surfing community that could have been lifted intact from Oahu’s North Shore. Although most of the women are comrades in arms, corporate drones or sex-buddies, the idea of Woman is represented as subversive and powerful — the source of equality, of horizontal networking rather than hierarchy and privilege. It is interesting to see how Morgan pulls that off, given the violence that is usually inflicted on his women characters.

Morgan is liberal with his use of the f-word. He uses it the way people under forty do now, for emphasis and pacing — and he also uses it correctly to mean copulation. Since the dialogue is one of the strong points of the book, and characters use many colorful phrases and descriptions, I can’t tell if Morgan is using rough language out of habit, in an attempt to capture a sense of camaraderie, or whether he is trying to show us something about the deadening of sensibility in his world. Reading this as the culmination of a trilogy, I would have to say the author is making a point about how far removed from humanity his characters have become.

Kovacs, the pinnacle of human engineering and conditioning, is a bit slow sometimes. I found myself yelling at the book, “It’s a setup! A setup!” more than once, like a viewer of a bad horror movie. Even though he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, he is inventive when the chips are down. Woken Furies has action and adventure. It has exotic animals that fight humans in pits. It has mythical beings who hurl lightning from the skies, and a woman revolutionary about to turn a complacent, corrupt planet upside down. Kovacs, at her side, may even achieve a measure of redemption. —Marion Deeds