Richard K. Morgan

Serving as a mercenary in a distasteful war, Takeshi Kovacs joins a covert team that aims to secure a coveted archeological prize, an endeavor that ensnares him in a web of treachery and betrayal unlike any he has experienced before. By the author of Altered Carbon. Original.

Broken Angels

High Fidelity

Loyalty is a currency like any other. What you have earned, you can spend.

Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don’t pray, don’t wish, don’t buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don’t give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act.

The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you’re no longer a soldier. You’re just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.”

You probably don’t want to hear it; most soldiers don’t. When you put on that uniform, you’re saying in effect that you resign your right to make independent decisions about the universe and your relationship to it.”

“Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit resleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.”

War has a soothing, simplifying effect on politics that must hit the politicians like a betathanatine rush. You don’t have to balance the issues anymore, and you can justify anything. Fight and win, and bring the victory home. Everything else whites out, like the sky over Sauberville.

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off?

altlovesbooks

"You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe."

So, I really liked the first book in this series when I read it last year. Sci-fi! Cyberpunk! Murder mystery! Detective noir stuff! All of that hit just the right notes with me, and I really appreciated the psychological spin the author put on the whole concept of resleeving. I was excited to pick up this book!

But then I discover that it's its own thing. Completely stand alone. And not even involving mysteries. Way more sci-fi, way more (unnecessary) sex. I thought the meat of the book was interesting, but I also felt like all the sex scenes in this one weren't quite necessary to advance the plot any. They just seemed like (un)interesting diversions the author wanted to go on while writing this book. Like if Morgan's editor was really Shatner, and he was whispering in Morgan's ear about sci-fi sex selling in entertainment media. 

Also. There was. Another thing that bothered me in this book. I. Don't exactly know how to describe it. Except that it involved lots of periods instead of proper punctuation. Like ellipses. Or. Commas. No. Instead we get. Paragraphs like these where the speaker would pause in the middle of a sentence. For effect. And then a new sentence would start up with the rest of their thought. It was. Super distracting. And kind of unnecessary. I'm not a writer. But I feel like I could write better sentence structure.

Still, I gave this book 3 stars, if only because I (still) really like the premise behind this series and the sci-finess of it all. The story was entertaining enough, if a little basic when compared with the plot and twists of the first book. I was still glad to have read it, but am hoping the third book recaptures a bit of the magic of the first for me.

Gavin

Morgan has a niche: stylish, sorta politically-literate hi-octane plotfests. Altered Carbon was noir; this one’s war reportage. Kovacs - his broke-down hard-boiled super-soldier - is good, able to carry off the witty sociopathy of the action hero involuntarily – tropes are brutally programmed into him.

‘Quell’, Morgan’s Marx-figure, lurks larger here. There’s a bucket of great tech ideas, but they’re never the focus; the people scrambling in the wake of their machines are still recognisably human. Great names, too (a nuked town named “Sauberville”, a mercenary broker named “Semetaire”.) His many characters are vivid; his prose brash; his themes large, dark, but not moping.

Broken Angels

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