[.ca] Broken Angels (ISBN 1400101387)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Broken Angels is a standalone sequel, to Richard Morgan's debut novel Altered Carbon--a high-tech, ultra-violent, noir SF thriller which attracted much attention, including a movie deal. Thirty years later, our super-soldier hero Takeshi Kovacs is wearing yet another body (swapping is easy in this future), already wounded in a messy war against revolutionary forces on the planet Sanction IV. Very soon he's lured from his duties into a hunt for a fantastic treasure discovered by archaeologists and carefully hushed up. The long-vanished Martians who once colonised the galaxy have left a buried hyperspace gateway leading to a working starship in distant orbit. Kovacs uses frightening violence to get the attention of corporate sponsors even more ruthless than himself. His hastily assembled exploration team must work in a lethal fallout zone, racing to open the gate before they're stopped by radiation sickness, treacherous sabotage, or the threat of fast-evolving nanoweaponry. And there are repeated hints that if they ever make it through that gateway, worse things are waiting on the far side... It's all desperately tense and crafted with appalling inventiveness. Life is cheap and death is no release, because the "cortical stack" implanted in everyone's spine constantly records the total personality, ready for "re-sleeving" in a new clone body or storage in virtual reality. So Kovacs goes recruiting at the macabre Soul Market, where thanks to the war there are literal skiploads of hacked-out sections of human spine containing stacks--for sale by the kilogram. Other ingredients include sex, voodoo, torture, multiple betrayal, cool military technology, incomprehensible alien constructions, age-old cycles of catastrophe, and--above all--extreme violence. The screw is turned further and further, beyond what seems possible. Readers may find themselves forgetting to breathe. This is a rattling good yarn, for the strong of stomach. --David Langford

The Martians are coming!:
Richard Morgan's Broken Angels is a neat (sometimes very messy) adventure story set against a sweeping backdrop of dirty politics, revolutionaries, corporate loyalties, and military action, and on this foundation it begins to construct a Martian mythology. This is the same world we were introduced to in Altered Carbon, further fleshed out and featuring the same but freshly sleeved hero, Takeshi Kovacs. Whereas Altered Carbon was a detective story driven by individuals, Broken Angels is a kind of treasure hunt, where personalities are secondary to the vast corporate and other forces that direct them. The noir is gone, but the darkness remains in this more traditional and militaristic sci-fi story. The characters, though secondary, are fully three-dimensional with consistent behaviour. When bodies are so easily replaced, identity by personality is very important, and Morgan is a master at this. Takeshi Kovacs remains complex, a product of his slum-ridden childhood, his special-ops training, and bio-engineering, including a wolf gene splice. The language and the violence are still pretty hard-boiled. But. The punctuation. Was driving me. Nuts. Periods are intended to mark the end of a full sentence or, at the very least, a complete thought. Here, they are used to mark. Both unnatural. And natural pauses. Dashes and ellipses are better suited to this purpose - showing... how we... slow down to... collect our thoughts, or when our - speech - is - externally - interrupted. Fire that copyeditor. The broken angels of the title are the vanished Martian civilization. I hope the archeologists of Richard Morgan's world will continue to pick away at their remains and piece together their culture in the promised third Kovacs novel, Woken Furies. http://magnificentoctopus.blogspot.com

My 100-word book review:
Morgan's second novel featuring ex-Envoy Takeshi Kovacs is an excellent, thought-provoking story of future war and alien discovery. The stack & sleeve technology first described in Altered Carbon gives the phrase "War is hell" a bleak new meaning, as the dead can now be harvested and re-used until their minds snap. We humans have reached the stars but retained our stupid territoriality and aggression; in the cold Broken Angels universe, comradeship and compassion are rare and to be treasured. This novel is a compelling (if not comfortable) read, and is a fine follow-up to the author's debut novel Altered Carbon.

Good, but not as great as Altered Carbon:
Altered Carbon is a great book that explored future technologies and existential issues. Richard Morgan's new book, Broken Angels is also good, but you should be aware that it's different. Altered Carbon is a thriller, a mystery where Takeshi is coming to terms with a murder and a new environment. It is action packed. Broken Angels is not as fast, but is more contemplative. It explores religion, ideology, and the human race's role in the universe. The exploration of these issues makes this book slower. However, it is still a great read and if you liked Altered Carbon, you will like Angels as well.

Between two stools.:
This sequel to Altered Carbon reads more agreeably, but is still too dependent upon the deployment of action and \olove\c scenes simply for the sake of it. The tail end of the book could have done with less dialogue and more narrative to balance it up. And there is still a credibility gap with respect to terminology and nomenclature, which seems out of place in a 26th century future context. Some attempt is made to imbue matters with a greater degree of political and motivational development than in Altered Carbon, but not as much as I would have preferred. I am still irked by the fairly obvious influences, in this case: Forbidden Planet, and the shadow creatures from Babylon 5, to name a couple. This is also an issue with other writers, whose apparently novel inclusions can turn out not to be, if one reads widely enough. Richard Morgan is a very good writer, but like other very good writers, he needs something significantly fresher than this to be getting on with.

Best new sf author in a decade . . .:
Morgan came out of nowhere in 2002 with _Altered Carbon_, the first novel about Takeshi Kovacs, overstressed, dangerously empathic diplomat/soldier trying to stay alive (more or less) four centuries into a future in which the mind lives in a bit of metal housed at the top of the spine and can be re-installed in any convenient "sleeve." This time out, a disgusted Kovacs is recruited by a deserter from the other side to set up an expedition to check out a major find left by the long-disappeared Martians -- who are the only reason humans are out in space to begin with. It's a quest tale, and a very good one, but the real pleasure, for me, is in the author's masterful portrayal and development of the characters. You don't necessarily have to like Kovacs, and you certainly wouldn't feel comfortable around him, but after two excellent novels, you would probably begin to understand him. There's some great quotable passages here, too, about the nature of war, and government, and loyalty, and the human situation in the universe. If _Broken Angels_ doesn't win the Hugo or the Nebula, or both, there is no justice. But, then, Kovacs knows that already.