This is the second Takeshi Kovacs novel, sequel to Altered Carbon. Kovacs is a former UN Envoy, a generally amoral individual loaded up with a bunch of sophisticated mental conditioning, and sent out into the world to troubleshoot problem spots for the world government. And he’s a guy who really puts the “shoot” in “troubleshoot”…
In Kovacs’s universe, humantiy has expanded to the stars using dribs and drabs of technology gleaned from the leavings of an alien race, known colloquially as “Martians,” because their first ruins were discovered on Mars. When the book opens, he’s working for a mercenary company in a stalemated little war on a backwater planet, and getting a bit bored. So, when an enterprising fellow comes to him with a story of an archeological dig finding a portal leading to an intact Martian spaceship, he jumps at the opportunity, bust the archeologist out of a prison camp, acquires some nasty corporate backing, and sets out to make a fortune.
This is essentially a Jack McDevitt plot as written by Neal Asher: a team of characters digs into the ruins and secrets of an ancient civilization, and along the way gets slaughtered in novel and graphic ways. It doesn’t really say anything all that deep about the human condition, but it’s got great SF scenery, and the action scenes are hard to beat.
I greatly enjoyed the Takeshi Kovacs novels, and so did my teenaged son. That’s a reality check for me. If I like something, it could be my idiosyncratic taste. If my wife and/or my son also likes it, then it is, to a first approximation, excellent. Generationally, my son and I are not expected to like, or even listen to, the same music. But we both love the Beatles.
Chad’s comparisons to Jack McDevitt and Neal Asher are plausible. Fred Pohl and others have written about technology from vanished aliens, as have the Strugatsky brothers and many other writers. There is the ultraviolence of Neal Asher, indeed, as well as a sly ironic Cyberpunk (or original Noir) dialogue.
I’ll read anything by Richard K. Morgan.
Thats funny. I got so bored with “Altered carbon” that I gave up half way through. It was a nice twist on some old stuff, but the technology stunk
(Yeah, like you can store what people are in a chip in the head and just implant it in another body, and yet the society as a whole isn’t completely different because of the associated technology that is necessary)
and I just got bored with the story. Kovacs was not sufficiently identifiable with for me to have any interest in what was going on.
@guthrie-really? You’re the first person I’ve heard who found Kovacs unappealing…As for the tech, I thought it was fine – seemed to me society had changed enough. A lot of sci-fi is based on tech revolutionizing existence. Well, if you look at human history – in some ways it does, but in others, we’re still just hairless apes. That’s why I like “gritty” sci-fi – it’s not pie in the sky semi-utopianism – I find it more real to expect that human society isn’t going to clean up just because we discover technology X.
As for the novel, well Altered Carbon – AC could have been written by the grandson of Hammett or Chandler – I find it a perfect noir in cyberpunk clothing.
@Vos Post – I too said that about RK Morgan…until his latest, Thirteen. I thought it was at *best* mediocre. 🙁
Really? I’m the only sensible person around? 😉
Whilst we’re on the topic, I also have problems with Alastair Reynolds, although he has done some interesting stuff. It would help if someone would force him to edit his tomes down a bit.
(I have no problem with people liking stuff different from myself, but when they are lauded to the skys as both Reynolds and Morgan have been, then I find that they are rather dull and not hugely interesting, then I get annoyed. And I have a high threshold for slow moving stuff- I read everything from Clarke to Banks to Cherryh)
I quite like gritty SF myself, but am having trouble finding any I want to read.
Re: Morgan, I think Kovacs is a fairly unpleasant character, but the books have a certain splattery energy to them. I wouldn’t say I find him easy to identify with, but he’s kind of middle-of-the-pack when it comes to amoral violent narrators.
I’ll agree about Reynolds needing to edit things down a bit. Pushing Ice had some good stuff in it, but man, did it go on. And, what’s worse, it skipped some of the bits that seemed likely to be the most interesting stuff…
One of the things I like best about the Kovacs books is thinking about the things Morgan doesn’t explore that seem interesting to me. That and blowing shit up real good.
guthrie: Sometimes you’re just tone deaf to somebody’s style. Everyone I know thinks Connie Willis is the best thing since sliced bread, and I’m “eh” at best. I just don’t get it. Shrug. Life’s like that sometimes.
MKK
Oh, I know life’s like that, but it doesn’t usually happen with books which are so (apparently) universally lauded. I read almost anything, except horror, and managed to finish Banks “The Algebraist”, yet “Altered Carbon” just didn’t press any buttons at all.
Connie Willis- hmm, I don’t think I have read anything of hers. Thanks for the suggestion.
I love the noir-ness of the Kovacs books. And they’re exciting, though rumor is Morgan wrote them with movie deals in mind. So there’s that.
But I’m with you on Reynolds…zzz…I read one of his books and I don’t even remember anything about it. It left no impression whatsoever on me.
Willis I love though – To Say Nothing of the Dog is brilliant and hilarious, and The Doomsday Book is a fantastic story.
Re: #3, cephyn warns that Morgan’s “latest, Thirteen…. was at *best* mediocre.”
I stand be to hear if Chad agrees, if and when he reads that novel, and perhaps I or some others of the readers of this blog will be able to comment then.
Mary Kay Kare correctly mentions the S word: Style. In that context, whether Kovacs is an “unpleasant character” or “Kovacs was not sufficiently identifiable” strikes at the heart of the issue of LITERATURE versus old-fashioned (pulp era and its echoes) Science Fiction.
Vladimir Nabokov, a scientist and one of the great writers of the 20th Century, intentionally had an “unpleasant character” at the center of his most famous novel, “Lolita” — a murderer and pedophile.
To the extent that he succeeds through plotting and stylistic genius in making the reader identify with the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, then the author has tricked the reader into some degree of complicity in murder and pedophilia.
A lengthy analysis of this is in the remarkable essay:
The Art of Literature and
the Science of Literature
The delight we get from detecting patterns
in books, and in life, can be measured
and understood
By Brian Boyd
The American Scholar
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp08/literature-boyd.html