On Finishing the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy...

Altered Carbon won the Philip K Dick Award in 2003, and it was a well-deserved win indeed!

It's a science fiction detective story (love a bit of crossover, me!) and also a kind of noir pastiche - it always seems to be night in the city and raining. One of the central ideas of the series is that a throughout their life a person's consciousness is continually backed up to a small storage device at the base of the skull, the “cortical stack”. The first consequence of this is that death is not necessarily permanent. For example, after being gunned down following some kind of botched criminal activity, Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in the rather used body of a Policeman, to find that a millionaire has paid to have him downloaded from the giant prison hard disk on which his data had been residing. The millionaire took his own head off with a plasma weapon a couple of days ago and had to have his last off-site backup downloaded into one of his spare bodies. Although it appears that no-one else could possibly have committed the crime he refuses to believe that he would ever kill himself (even temporarily) and has hired Kovacs as detective and enforcer, to find his murderer.

Takeshi Kovacs is a man with a past, or more accurately a whole heap of them. Until recently, he served in the Envoy Corps, the most feared soldiers anywhere in the “Protectorate” of human worlds. In this version of the future faster than light travel is not a possibility, but FTL communications are. This means that if you don't want to end up in a “Forever War” situation, you can send digitised humans to wherever you want to deploy your forces, download them into specially-built combat bodies. The Envoys are trained to deal with finding yourself on a new planet, wearing a new body with people shooting at you. As well as being trained in practical things like shooting and killing, they are also trained to observe, recall, learn to fit in and infiltrate. As a result they are so mistrusted that ex-Envoys are barred from nearly all positions of any power or responsibility in civilian life.

I think the reader can appreciate that when Kovacs works out who has been pulling his strings on Earth and why, he's going to embark on an ass-kicking spree of epic proportions.

How good was this book? It was so good that by the time I was half-way through, I was having nightmares about my time in the Envoy Corps. It was so good that I slightly resented the other two books in the trilogy for not being Altered Carbon (a bit of an own goal for Mr Morgan, that).

Broken Angels

I was rather sad to see that after playing detective Takeshi Kovacs is now back to killing people for money, serving with “The Wedge” (feared, but nothing like so much as the Envoys) in the civil war on Sanction IV.

By the time the book begins he's desperate to extricate himself from the war by any means possible. He is approached by a pilot and a younng archeologist who claim to have discovered some sort of portal leading directly to a fleet of abandonned Martian spaceships. Never mind the intellectual excitement of alien technology, the salvage on that lot has to be worth enough get the hell out Sanction IV! So a crack team is assembled by sorting through a bucket load of cortical stacks found on the battlefield, looking for special ops personnel with the right qualities for a spot of extra curricular speed-archeology. Getting to the Martian fleet before anyone else isn't going to be easy, especially since the area containing the portal is now full of illegal, experimental nano-tech wepons...

I felt that Broken Angels lacked a lot of the style of Altered Carbon, but it was enjoyable enough. The bad-ass spacemarine Wedge Commander aggrieved at the defection of his pet Envoy makes a fitting end-of-level baddie for the big fight at the end. And we get to find out more about the mysterious Martian artifacts left hanging about which humanity as used to jump-start their colonization of other planets, 2001-style.

At the start of Woken Furies, Kovacs is now killing for fun rather than profit, attempting to slowly wipe out the entire priest caste of the religion that killed his ex-girlfriend, Sarah. While running from the law in a damaged synthetic body he falls in with deComs, teams of mercenaries hired to decommission the 300 year-old weaponry which has been cluttering up his home planet since the Quellist uprising known as the Unsettlement. One of his new deCom friends has an unfortunate mental problem in that she appears to be sharing her head with someone who claims to be the long-dead revolutionary leader, Quellcrest Falconer. (Like Communism, Quellism has some excellent slogans and quotations, one of my favourites being, “When they ask how I died, tell them: Still angry.”).

Once again, it was nothing like as good as Altered Carbon, but “Woken Furies” still inspired me to vote Quellist at the local elections on May 1st.

While reading this trilogy, I had some logical problems with the cortical stack - why would the state pay for everyone to get one? Especially when the Protectorate is Uber-capitalist in all other ways. When do you fit one? Can the very young be killed off completely? Humans being what they are (and they do not seem to have become any less violent in Morgan's future) I suspect that the invention of the cortical stack would be followed pretty swiftly by the invention of some stack-frying EMP weapons.

On the whole, I was rather surprised to find that I like Takeshi Kovacs much more when he's being nice. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age... I understand the concept of the flawed hero, and I totally get the premise that we can have a lot more tension in the story with a rather amoral lead charater, 'cos we never really know which way he'll go. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that if I don't really like the hero, I don't really care if he's properly killed, "stack irretrievable" or not. Sorry Tak!

Richard Morgan won this year's Arthur C Clarke Award (http://www.clarkeaward.com/) with “Black Man”. Llet's hope this means a return to Altered Carbon standards!

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penny

Like most right-thinking people, I have a bit of a fear of prize-winning novels. Despite feeling a weird sort of moral obligation to read them, I frequently find them boring, turgid, overwritten and without a sufficiently strong story to support the weight of all those words. If any of you have been living in fear of “The Tenderness of Wolves”, you can stop now. Despite winning the Costa Book of the Year 2006, it’s a very readable detective story and actually a real page-turner. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I began to wonder why this counts as literary fiction while, say, the Inspector Morse novels don’t. So far, I’ve no answer to that.

At the start of a Canadian winter, a middle aged settler, Mrs Ross gets up one day to find that her neighbour, Laurent Jammet has been murdered and scalped during the night, and her teenage son has also gone missing. Pretty soon the gossips are suggesting that the two events are related. Some officials from The Hudson’s Bay Company (like a sort of Canadian equivalent of the Eat India Company) are sent to investigate and they get to work trampling on the feelings of the locals and busting some heads. As winter approaches, Mrs Ross chooses to set off through the snow in search of her son, in the hope of clearing his name.

I note that the Hudson Bay Trading Company is not only real, but is still trading. A wonder that it hasn’t sued Ms Penny as the story doesn’t show it a particularly good light. Mind you, I doubt that any of the unpleasant things the company and its representatives do aren’t historically accurate.

Anyway, if you’re planning to read this book for yourself, then stop reading this blog because I couldn’t work out how to discuss the book further without giving away some of the ending.

My overall impression is one of bleakness. Firstly we have the beautifully described Canadian winter, complete with frostbite, snow blindness and having to defrost the ink before you can write letters. Bleaker still, though, is that every single character seems to be an outsider. Everyone is isolated and alone in the world:

• Mrs Ross carries the burden of her past as an asylum inmate and laudanum addict. By the time the story takes place her marriage has deteriorated to the point where her husband does not look at her or speak to her. I imagine them both looking as miserable as the couple in this famous picture. Mrs Ross’s son, Francis has also stopped speaking to her for reasons of his own...
• Francis Ross cannot tell anyone about his romantic involvement with the murder victim, because it’s the 1840s and he’d probably be jailed or thrown in the loony bin. Nevertheless, his father guesses and becomes moodier than ever.
• Donald Moody is deeply neurotic and convinced of his own inferiority. He has come from Scotland to work for the Company but hates the cold, the hardship, and the rough men who spend all winter drunk because there is nothing else to do. His motivation in aiding Mrs Ross is not so much a desire for justice, but to cover his arse out of fear that he will be deemed to have screwed up and his career will be over. He wastes a good deal of time mooning over the beautiful Susannah Knox before realising that it her clever, challenging sister, Maria he wants. Unfortunately, this realisation comes a bit late in the day, and Donald is shot by the villain before he can tell Maria about it.
• Maria Knox is now doomed to die alone and be eaten by her cats, thanks to Donald’s death. Eclipsed by her prettier younger sister she has become a forbidding intellectual type and up to now, men have bolted at the sight of her.
• Mr Knox has thrown away his status as local magistrate by allowing the half-Indian prisoner, William Parker, to escape. Knox couldn’t allow the Company investigators to beat up a prisoner, but he brings shame on his family and barely escapes jail himself for doing the right thing. He loses his position and with it his sense of purpose. All of this leaves him a broken man at the novel’s end.

And so it goes on! We are each of us ultimately alone in a world without mercy according to the mind behind this novel. It’s probably true, but in the interest of preserving sanity, I’m not going to think about it anymore.