BOOK REVIEW: Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan

The first two Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, are pretty amazing, so it's bittersweet to be reading and reviewing Woken Furies, which is billed as the third and last of the series.

Each of the three books featuring Takeshi Kovacs written by Morgan is so different it's hard to call them part of the same series, but they do all feature Kovacs, a hard-bitten, world-weary, brutally efficient killing machine and violent mercenary with his own unique sense of fairness and justice in the very unfair universe of the future.

Altered Carbon takes place on Earth, in a faintly recognizable San Francisco Bay Area several centuries in the future, where Kovacs has been hired by an incredibly rich and old man to find out why he killed himself (or someone made it seem like he did). In Morgan's vision of the future consciousness download technology is  available, but not cheap. So, both Kovacs and the formerly dead man have been downloaded into new bodies (called "sleeves") from their memories stored in their "cortical stack." Morgan's depiction of an Earth of the future dominated by megalomaniacal oligarchs and capitalism run amok is weaved in with a  suspense-filled, violent hunt for the truth of the reason for the mysterious death. Synopsis: Maltese Falcon meets Bladerunner.

Broken Angels is set a couple decades in the future, subjective time, on a completely different planet called Sanction IV. Consciousness can be beamed from one planet (and star system) to another and then downloaded into a brand new sleeve. It's basically a way of virtually travelling at the speed of light. Kovacs begins the book in pure mercenary mode, fighting for the bad guys in a civil war he doesn't believe in . However, he goes AWOL to lead a mission to find and plunder a secret hoard of priceless alien artifacts with a corporate money man and two mysterious strangers he shouldn't (but does and doesn't) trust. Synopsis: Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Alien.

Woken Furies has Kovacs back on his homeworld, Harlan's World, which is 90% covered with water but also orbited by Martian artefacts which rain destructive "angel fire" on any "too large" object which exceeds a vertical distance of 400 meters above the surface. Kovacs is engaged in an extensive campaign of vengeful murder against a powerful religious sect who have rejected the promise of immortality via technology the consciousness download process provides. After saving a woman with advanced implants who was being attacked by some of the more militant members of the sect by slaughtering a half-dozen of them, he discovers that she is the head of a group of mercenaries who are working to decontaminate a nearby continent of abandoned military hardware with artificial intelligence that has run amok. The woman is named Sylvie and she can provide Koacs safe passage from the consequences of his latest massacre.

Kovacs ends up joining Sylvie's "decon" team and is able to get the team out of danger when a raid goes wrong and Sylvie is injured. While Sylvie is off-line she goes through an episode where it seems as if another personality is residing within her. The other personality appears to be Quellcrist Falconer, the most important revolutionary figure in the last several hundred years of struggle against the oligarchal families who run Harlan's World. Falconer has been dead for hundreds of years but Sylvie/Quellcrist appears to be aware of information that only Falconer would know.

Kovacs is being chased by a younger version of himself who is working for the Harlan family for reasons which are some combination of retribution for Kovacs' murderous rampage, a desperate attempt to find and neutralize Quellcrist/Sylvia and suppress any neo-Quellist revolutionaries and a desire to eliminate the competition provided by the "older-model" Kovacs.

All these motives and motivations are portrayed and resolved by Morgan in an engrossing way which is somehow not as compelling as the denouement in Broken Angels. He does make it possible that another Takeshi Kovacs novel of some kind could follow this one, but the author has expressed his desire for this to be the last one and moved on to writing a ground-breaking fantasy series, starting with The Steel Remains.
Morgan has quickly jumped to the top of my list of authors whose work I will look out for, just beneath the likes of Peter F. Hamilton, Patrick Rothfuss and Peter V. Brett.

Title: Woken Furies 
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Length: 480 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Published: May 29, 2007.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.75/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

Eye Candy: Rob Evans

Rob Evans is a 23-year-old, 6'3" British model who has been catching the all over the blogosphere and on fashion runways all over the world. He has been signed by multiple modeling agencies. The shots shown above were taken by noted photographer Joseph Bleu. There are a whole bunch of more pictures of Rob at Socialite Life. 

He has an interesting look reminiscent of another Black British hottie, Ben Lauder-Dykes, who was an Eye Candy model back in September 2010. I can't really decide between the two, can you?

CANADA: Progressives Now In 2nd, Polls Say

Canada is in the midst of their "snap elections: with voters going to the polls on Monday May 2. The current government is run by the Conservative party, with the Liberals being the official opposition. Previously, the Liberals held power in Canada for over a decade, losing power in 2006, with Stephen Harper becoming Prime Minister at the head of a minority government.

But,  now, a week before the next countrywide election, the New Democratic Party (NDP) is outpolling the Liberal party and could potentially form a government in coalition with the Green Party. Conventional wisdom has been that "NDP could never win" so most non-Conservatives outside of Quebec have generally been forced to vote for the Liberal party while holding their nose. This is a similar situation to what happens in the United kingdom with the three parties being the Conservatives (Tories), Labour and the Liberal Democrats. In last year's elections the Conservatives and LDP formed a Coalition government to replace more than a decade of Labour-led British governments. This was the first time in generations the perennial third party LDP had a meaningful role in government. Now it looks like that story may be repeating in Canada.

MadProfessah spent some time in Canada earlier this year and am something of a Canada-phile. I'll be looking at their election results next week with great interest!

BOOK REVIEW: Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

I have been hearing a lot about the Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard K. Morgan and after spending the first 6 weeks of the year or so engrossed in reading the first four books of the acclaimed fantasy series Songs of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, I wanted to return to hard sci-fi instead of "swords and lords" fantasy.

Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books are well-known for their seamless melding of Raymond Chandler-esque hard-boiled detective noir atmosphere with the dizzying speculative future of William Gibson's cyberpunk. Since I'm a fan of both mysteries and science fiction this sounded good to me, but I was blown away by how well Morgan immerses the reader in his detailed future of a time where human life has become less valuable because of a technological advance called a "cortical stack" which allows the consciousness of people to be downloaded into a new body (chillingly referred to by Morgan as a "sleeve" with all the concomitant utilitarian and commonplace characteristics the word implies) after death. Peter F, Hamilton and other hard science-fiction authors have postulated similar technological solutions to physical death but Morgan's writing viscerally communicates to the reader what it would be like to have one person's brain downloaded into another person's body and additionally Morgan's plot depicts several of the complications and conundrums that can result.

One of the first thoughts that comes to mind after reading the first chapter or two of Altered Carbon, is "This would make an amazing movie, like Blade Runner." In fact, Morgan's debut novel Altered Carbon, won the 2003 Phillip K. Dick Award for Best First Novel and has been optioned by Hollywood to become "a major motion picture."

Takeshi Kovacs is an amazing creation. He is the ultimate anti-hero, a violent, highly trained elite soldier (called a United Nations Envoy) who is also sensitive to the plight of the powerless. And he is the main character in a book which is, as one reviewer on Goodreads described it, "A sex fueled scifi badass ex-super solider detective noir novel that rocks really hard."

The plot gets incredibly twisted (in multiple senses of the word) at times and it is always hard to tell who the bad guys are from the really, really bad guys but in the end one is convinced by the innate goodness of Takeshi and always interested in seeing what will happen next. I can't wait to read the other two Takeshi Kovacs novels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies.

Title: Altered Carbon
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Length: 375 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Published: (1st Edition) March 4, 2003.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.75/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Iain M. Banks' Surface Detail

I received the latest Banks Culture novel for Chrismuhkwanzakkuh this year from my Amazon wishlist. I'm a big fan of Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds, who are also very popular and well-known British science fiction authors. Iain M. Banks is often added to that list, as is Neal Asher, and although I have read books by both of them, the only work by either of them that has come close to being as engrossing to me as a(ny) Hamilton or Reynolds book is Banks' Matter, which was the previous Culture novel.

The latest Culture novel is Surface Detail which is about the nature of death itself, as well as revenge and faith. The central character is Lededje Y'breq, a slave on the planet of Sichult, who is killed by her owner, Joiler Veppers, the richest man in the world. Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, a person who has been genetically engineered with an intricate, strikingly beautiful tattoo (yes, a "surface detail" of the title), which illustrates her indentured servitude and shameful familial debt to Veppers.

Y'breq is revented (reincarnated) by a Culture artifact which had been implanted in her head without her knowledge. The notion of death and after-life is a central theme of Surface Detail. Banks creates the notion that there is a philosophical dispute between various technologically advanced societies: some wish to have a Hell of an after-life while others have no after-life whatsoever. The dispute is currently being resolved through  a virtual war between the "pro-Hell and "anti-Hell" forces. The Culture is in the anti-Hell coalition and it turns out that the planet of Sichult and Joiler Veppers is a inter-stellar level player in the dispute over what should happen after death.

As with his other books, Surface Detail is a large book with many characters in addition to multiple plot strands. Unfortunately, many of the characters are not as interesting as as Y'breq and Veppers. For (too) long stretches of the book we are following the stories of other characters such as Prin and Chay, two non-humanoid aliens who are trying to expose the horrific nature of their species' Hell in order to diminish the appeal and salience of perdition. Another character which frankly bored me was Sergeant Vateuil, who is a fighter in the anti-Hell forces, and who may or may not have a connection to a central character in a few of the earlier Culture books.

What I liked about Banks' Matter, was its focus on an appealing central character (Dziet Sma) combined with quirky humor. There is almost no humor in Surface Detail  apart from Banks' longtime staple of the names and interactions between ship controlling artificial intelligences called Minds. At this point, that simply was not enough. I will be more skeptical about future Culture books by Banks, probably waiting to get them in paperback at the library instead of in hardcover. They simply are not at the same level of excellence, complexity and creativity as the other British sci-fi masters Hamilton and Reynolds.

Title: Surface Detail

Author: Iain M. Banks

Length: 640 pages.

Publisher: Orbit.

Date: October 28, 2010.

OVERALL GRADE: B/B+.

PLOT: B+.

IMAGERY: B.

IMPACT: B-. 

WRITING: B+.

OSCARS 2011: The King's Speech Set For Sweep

The Oscars race has become clearer in the last few weeks as the main guilds, the Producers Guild (PGA), Directors Guild (DGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG), have all awarded The King's Speech their highest award, making an Oscar night of historic proportions seem like an inevitability.

Director Tom Hooper, a first-time DGA nominee won the DGA award and is probably a frontrunner for the Best Director Academy Award despite critical clamor for The Social Network's David Fincher. The top PGA award went to The King's Speech, which is significant because, like the Oscars, 10 films were eligible for the top honor. At the SAG Awards Colin Firth continued his sweep of the pre-Oscar awards for Best Actor and the film won the Best Ensemble award.

Other frontrunners for Oscars are Natalie Portman (Black Swan) for Best Actress and Christian Bale (The Fighter) for Best Supporting Actor. Some people think Melissa Leo (The Fighter) is also a lock for Best Supporting Actress, but I have my doubts.