Friday, February 10, 2017

"Woken Furies" by Richard Morgan

The third part of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, definitely better than the second one (not a great achievement), but not as good as the first one.  No wonder Netflix is basing its series only on the first volume, "Altered Carbon".

Kovacs is old here, both physically and definitely mentally, starting the question what has he done with his life and could have he made better choices.  It happens on his home planet, Harlan's World, the only planet orbiting the Glimmer star system, and, of course, located by the human kind based on the "Martian" astrogation charts.  The "Martians" being the ancient alien sapient race that populated large swaths of the Perseus Arm, home to the human race, and disappeared somewhere about 500,000 years ago.

The book also gives us the Morgan's most interesting creation, Quellcrist Falconer, or Nadia Makita, the revolutionary leader who overthrew the Harlan's world first families 320 years ago, for a short while, and got killed by "Angelfire' from the "Martian" probes orbiting the planet.  The big reveal in the end has to do with what "Angelfire" does besides vaporizing.  Also Tak seems to have been copied during his early UN Protectorate Envoy years and now this younger Tak, who hasn't been to Sanction 4, is working for the Harlans and tries to kill the old Tak, whom he despises, but only manages to kill, pretty much, all of his friends and collaborators.

The book is slow at parts, but overall works well.  Not at the level of the first volume, Altered Carbon, but well nevertheless.  Seems like Morgan tried to experiment with too many different genres in the three volumes, probably would'be been better to stick to the first volume formula, cyberpunk, hard-boiled detective story.


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