Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz
In this semi-sequel to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's body hopping anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs returns, this time to take two-fisted aim at corporate greed and the commercialization of war.
Sixty years after the events of Carbon (which is referenced briefly once then promptly forgotten), Kovacs is now a mercenary fighting on the revolution-wracked world of Sanction IV, where rebels are liberally dispensing nukes to anyone they don't like, while the corporate-backed cartel government is using even worse weapons.
In the midst of all this, Kovacs is approached by a deserter from the rebel side with a proposition: help uncover a 'Martian' artifact found on the planet, and help everyone involved become filthy rich. (Martians being the colloquial name for a race of presumably-extinct highly advanced aliens whose ruins mankind has discovered).
To that end, Kovacs assembles a team consisting of such Dirty Dozen tropes as the Demolitions Expert, the Ninja Assassin, the Hotshot Pilot and you get the idea. They all go traipsing off to a highly irradiated beach that will inevitably kill them all as they dig for said artifact.
Oh that's right, this is the universe where people's consciousness is digitally backed up in a 'cortical stack' implanted inside their spines, allowing them to be ported from one body to another or even squirted across space to another star.
Now, being backed up strikes me as being pretty cold comfort if you're dead (Morgan establishes in graphic detail that getting shot in the head still kills you--the stack is a backup, not the real you). I could see it being a kind of life insurance deal (at least my family will be provided for, etc.) in the event of accidental death, but in Broken Angels a whole platoon of guys go into a hot zone knowing they are 100% positively absotively going to die, and comfort themselves with the knowledge that their digital selves will enjoy a reward afterwards. That seems a trifle ... psychotic. No?
Removed from Altered Carbon's urban setting this feels much more military scifi than cyberpunk, though to be honest the secret elite crack super-soldier crack elite super squad do very little but die of radiation exposure and have graphic sex with Kovacs.
And can I point out how creepy it is to have vivid sex scenes in a book that's written in first person? Who exactly are we supposed to imagine Kovacs is telling all these slippery, gushy, wet and wild stories to? I wish I could say this was an indication Kovacs is an unreliable narrator who is far too into himself, but the rest of the book is presented as fact. I just picture the interviewer or amanuensis's horrified face as Kovacs wades into excruciating details about glands and secretions and thrusting and moaning. Hope they were paid well.
The message is presented with a little more nuance here than in Altered Carbon, even if the message itself is still not terribly subtle. In Altered Carbon, it was 'rich=bad, so rise up and murder the bastards.' Here, corporations that profit from war are in the target sights, but so are fanatics who use their revolutionary fervor to justify their revolting actions. It's balanced, but it does rather mean it reaches conclusions as trite as 'war is bad,' 'ruthless companies are bad' and 'fanaticism is bad.'
All that said, this is my favorite of the three Kovacs books. A sense of impending doom builds throughout the book, with the soldiers working to unravel the mystery before radiation unravels their DNA, culminating in an apocalyptic burst of action that is much more original and satisfying than, say, Altered Carbon's endless techno-ninja shenanigans. On the other hand, that does mean it's more slow-moving, which may test the patience of people expecting more of the same from the last book.
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