Woken Furies

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What an amazing new cyber punk writer! This series (three books so far) is the most imaginative tale of the far future I have ever had the pleasure to read. The characters (not just Takeshi) are well drawn and believable, however dubious their cyborg-like existence and immortality may be, and the plots of all the novels are superbly developed and so fast paced as to leave one breathless. This third venture has less graphic sex than its predecessors, but all the action is intense and gripping. The author's "Market Forces" was a cousin to this series, and I look forward to other wildly imaginative tales in years to come. Guaranteed to banish boredom!

I'd been waiting for quite a while to read this third entry in Richard K. Morgan's series of Takeshi Kovacs novels. It was worth the wait, and in some respects it may be the best of the series so far. Tak travels through some dark, dark territory here. Don't be fooled (or put off) by the pace. Where _Altered Carbon_ was a rapid series of body blows, _Woken Furies_ is more like being dragged down very slowly by a very large weight. There's a lot going on here, but quite a bit of it is in the background and between the lines. If you don't get into Tak's head pretty early on, the novel may read like a travelogue. Not that that's necessarily _bad_. Probably a lot of us were curious about Harlan's World, and we get to see quite a bit of it here. We also finally get to put faces (the faces of their current sleeves, anyway) with some familiar names from Tak's past. All of that will probably be interesting enough to entertain the casual reader. But if that's all you get out of this novel, then you're missing the meat of it. The surface-level plot opens with Tak on Harlan's World in a synthetic sleeve, trying to get back into his own body. He's also, as we gradually discover, on some sort of mission, the details of which we don't really learn until some 250 pages in. And not too far into the tale, we meet someone who just _might_ turn out to be Quellcrist Falconer . . . or maybe not. Furthermore, Tak is being pursued by a younger version of himself, decanted from a backup copy he didn't know existed. Things build toward a final revelation with implications far, far beyond Quellism and the local politics of Harlan's World. The pace, though, is generally slow. Oh, things do happen (and people start dying horribly within the first twenty-odd pages), but a lot of the action is off-screen. We spend the bulk of the novel the way we spent most of _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_: Going Somewhere. The really interesting stuff, and the real, behind-the-narrative content of the novel, is what happens to Tak. I'm not going to give you any more clues about this; I'm just going to warn you to listen with both ears as those titular furies awaken and the possibilities of redemption come and go. There's a lot of internal turmoil going on here, and Tak isn't necessarily going to tell you about it directly. Hell, despite his Envoy training, I'm not sure he's even fully aware of all of it himself. Readers who keep wanting recycled versions of _Altered Carbon_ will continue to be disappointed, as they were with _Broken Angels_; Morgan clearly isn't going to keep rewriting the same book for us. Now, me, I think that's a good thing.

It's always a delight to find an author who creates characters in three dimensions instead of the more usual two; Morgan seems to stretch his people to five or six. This is the third novel in the series about Takeshi Kovacs, ex-Envoy, stone killer, freelance renegade, and very dangerous man to be on the wrong side of. It's been three centuries, objective time, and Kovacs is back on Harlan's World, where he originally came from. It's also been a couple of centuries since the Resettlement, the failed Quellist revolution that gave the Harlan family oligarchy a run for its money, and Kovacs -- who only wants to continue killing fundamentalist priests (it's personal) -- finds himself caught up, first, in the attempt to reclaim the nanoware-drenched continent the revolution produced, and, later, in a new revolutionary plot. Because it's part of Quell's teachings, that when things go against you, you retreat and you wait -- for generations, if necessary. But now, just maybe, Quellquist Falconer might be back, in the flesh. But that's just this novel's top-level plot. There's also Kovacs's vendetta against those who let die the only woman who mattered to him -- Real Death, no resleeving. And there's his longstanding relationships with the several criminal cultures of Harlan's World, and with his old Envoy trainer. Not to even mention being hunted by a younger, smart-assed version of himself. And, just out of sight, there are the vanished Martians, about whom we learned a lot in Morgan's second book, Broken Angels. There's military and political philosophy here, all of it cynical, there's imaginative anthropology, there's a certain amount of gruff sex, there are some great quotes, there's considerable death (some deserved, some not), and there are breath-grabbing battle scenes like you haven't read in years. Morgan's second Kovacs novel was twice as good as his first. This one is three times as good as his second. If this one doesn't win both the Hugo and the Nebula, there's no justice. But, hey -- Kovacs already knows that. PS -- I was astonished a previous reviewer compared this to Bester's _The Stars My Destination_. A great book, don't get me wrong (I even own a First Edition copy of it), but Gully Foyle is pretty and pale and poetic beside the dark and blistering Takeshi Kovacs!

I have to admit, I'm hooked. I can't get enough of Richard Morgan's distopian future. I was so eager to read Woken Furies that I arranged to get a copy from Great Britain (because it was released months earlier than in the US). I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Like Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, it treats you to a highly-charged whirlwind of a story centered on the activities of Takeshi Kovacs. In this episode, a Yakuza family have hired an earlier version of himself to track him down. Complicating matters are a personal vendetta against a particularly vicious religious group, and a woman who may (or may not) be a re-embodied revolutionary named Quellcrist Falconer. I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that you see more of Kovacs' humanity than in previous novels. NOT that Woken Furies is a "group-hug" kind of book. Far from it. In fact, Kovacs seems even more violent and misanthropic than in the first two books. However, we understand "why" a bit more and we see more of the effects 2 centuries of war and crime have had on him. Kovacs has firmly established himself as my new favorite literary character. As in his other 2 Takeshi Kovacs novels, Richard Morgan gives us a character of suprising depth and humanity that is still capable of incredible savagery; in addition to a perfectly-realized vision of a future in which technology hasn't eliminated war or crime, but has grown with it.

In the distant future, Takeshi Kovacs heads home to repressive Harlan's World to eerily confront himself when he was an Envoy working for the UN as a super soldier to keep people on the remote planets in check. Since he could afford to leave that body behind, Takeshi downloaded his personality into a new "sleeve" and left for another world to start life anew. On Harlan's World, Kovacs soon finds himself protecting Sylvie, an apparent reincarnation of a long dead messiah, from the First Families, who need her dead as her message interferes with the power they yield. The First Families send an Envoy to kill Sylvie, but Kovacs believes the killer is a younger healthier him. This is an action-packed science fiction Noir that starts in hyperspeed before accelerating into faster than light velocity. The suspense laden story line is all action except when Richard K. Morgan chooses to pontificate against any form of religious fundamentalism, which Kovacs believes by its essence means its burden requires either altering carbon structure or breaking the angels of those of other belief systems. Kovacs is at his best when affirming you can't home, at least not safely. Fans of electrifying futuristic thrillers will appreciate the award winning author's latest triumph. Harriet Klausner