This is the second entry in the "Takeshi Kovacs" series, but where the first book was a hard-boiled detective story, this is more typical military science fiction: the recovery of mysterious ancient alien artifacts taking place with a background of vicious planetary warfare. I was satisfied with the plot and impressed with the characterization. Morgan's writing is rich and very dense - this is not a quick read - and I was drawn deeply into Kovacs's universe.

I've seen some complaints about a part More...

While not as good as Altered Carbon, this still has enough going on to be interesting. It's more a creepy ghost story than a mystery, and for a while there's some excellent suspense - Who might be sabotaging the crew from within? Who might come out from the other side of that Martian gate? And what will those crazy nanobots think of next? Be forwarned, though, that herein lies the absolute worst sex scene that has ever been put to paper. The fact that is takes place in virtual reality is no excu More...

It's just not as good as the first one!

OK, there, I said it. And I mean it.

I can only imagine that writing a follow up to critically acclaimed novel has got to be a bummer. Think about it. You got this big awesome first story with all these great ingredients and an amazingly complex and fascinating protagonist. You also got mad style as a writer. And you definately have a book deal for a sequel that might actually pay the bills for the year and leave you in peace to write. Sounds not so bad hu More...

I must admit how disappointed I am with this book. Altered Carbon grabbed me by the throat almost from the opening line while Broken just sort of held my attention and only because I like the Kovacs sometimes sardonic, ultimately haunted character.

The fascination with stack transferrence is still there which has always been a selling point for me as is the tendency to make everything ultraviolent (enhances the story line IMO) but the characters are utterly forgettable. Hand, the corporate shill More...

Having enjoyed the first novel in this series (Altered Carbon) I honestly don’t remember why I did not immediately pick up Broken Angels. Perhaps I was intending to wait for more books to be written, or to stretch out the goodness, or I was just plain lazy. They’re all potentially correct.

Broken Angels takes place a longish time after the events in Altered Carbon and also follows the adventures of everyone’s favorite Solider-Of-Fortune, Takeshi Kovacs. (He is not to be confused with the earthly More...

Originally published on my blog here in December 2003.

Richard Morgan's first novel, Altered Carbon, immediately established him as someone to watch in the science fiction genre. A year later, his second novel will have been eagerly awaited by those who enjoyed his first. In it, he picks up the story of former UN envoy Takeshi Kovacs again, some decades later; he is now involved in a brutal civil war on the planet Sanction IV.

Recovering in hospital from a wound, he is approached to take part in a More...

As is probably obvious, Broken Angels is the second in the Takeshi Kovacs series.

It deals with the same problems as the first book, in that despite being a sharply intelligent and well-realised story, it's not necessarily fun. The protagonist is well-realised but not particularly likeable, and the story itself is grim.

Then again, that's hardly beyond the pale for noir-esque tales, and it certainly fits the context here.

With that out of the way, considering it's true of the entire series at large More...

The misplaced titles game: Broken Angels ought to be the title of some rancidly sweet early twentieth century morality tale of former prostitutes finding God in a halfway house. In reality, it’s a psychopathically violent pseudomilitary skiffy tale of humans mucking about in the remains of the long-gone Martian civilization; the entire main cast spends about two-thirds of this book dying in agony from radiation sickness, and the remaining third poking into their consciences and not liking what t More...

Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacsnovels have a stellar reputation among hard core science fiction fans. I have previouslyenjoyedreading Morgan's first book in the series, the exciting Altered Carbon , which introduces the Takeshi Kovacs character to the world.

In the second book Broken Angels , Morgan puts Kovacs in another compelling and very dangerous situation, while stillmaintainingthe character's unlikeability. The themes of the first book, explicit sexuality, corporate greed, capitalist malfe More...

The same, but different. That's what we want from a sequel, after all, and in that Richard K. Morgan certainly delivers.

I thought Takeshi Kovacs' debut in Morgan's debut novel Altered Carbon was stunning. Broken Angels is somewhat less so—the shock of the new has worn off a little... but it's still pretty good.

Altered Carbon was instantly familiar, in a way—a solid noir detective novel, set on a retrograde Earth at the heart of a small but growing interstellar human culture. The differences—othe More...

"Mi guardai attorno sulla piattaforma e di colpo le parole di Sutjiadi mi investirono frontalmente. Non dovremmo essere qui.
Sopra la mia testa, il marziano ci guardava, cieco. Distante come qualunque angelo, e altrettanto utile."

Il romanzo che mi ha fatto conoscere e innamorare perdutamente di Morgan.
Alcuni hanno detto soprattutto di questo libro che sembra più un film d'azione e di fantascienza. Io lo riaffermo, come complimento: perché il mondo evocato in questo romanzo è affollatissimo, ricc

More...

This is the second installment of the Takashi Kovacs novels; a series of misanthropic cyberpunk novels that involve an easy exchange of bodies (sleeves) so long at their cortical stacks (a constructed cylinder in the back of the sleeve's head that contain the memories and personality of an individual) remains intact.

As much of a detective novel as the first installment was (Altered Carbon), this one strays far from that genre. This is, more or less, a mercenary plotline with a smattering of the More...

Richard Morgan est un nouveau venu dans le cercle pas si restreint des auteurs de Science-Fiction britanniques. Il est parvenu en trois romans à renouveler et remettre au goût du jour le genre du cyberpunk, traditionnellement associé aux années 1980 et de plus en plus considéré comme désuet. Lorsqu’on lit sur le quatrième de couverture d’Anges Déchus que l’auteur a récemment entrepris de passer un bachelor d’Economie du développement, on est peu surpris de la teneur politique de ses ouvrages (da More...

While the first of these was a kinda science-fiction detective story, this one is sort of a treasure-hunting adventure in a war-zone and space. It was only ok, as far as the plot goes.

I found it annoying that. People talk. Like this. A lot. That would be okay if it was an occasional thing for emphasis, but it was really overdone.

The protagonist had some serious psychological issues too this time around, imagining conversations with a character he'd only met for 5 minutes and exchanged a few se More...

Book 2 of the loosely connected Takeshi Kovacs trilogy. It leaves the gumshoe framing behind for a heavyhanded war fable with the overall moral that war is hell, technology does not relieve suffering, etc.; this will be bludgeoned into the reader by the end.

The strength of Altered Carbon lay primarily in its straightforward gumshoe PI framing. Free of that, the weaknesses start shining through. First and foremost, a serious failure of imagination that you see a lot of when you've read a bunch of More...

A very different book from Altered Carbon. And not nearly as good. Is this one of those cases where a successful author isn't subject to as much editorial control?

A difference that doesn't bother me is that Broken Angels is more SF and less murder mystery than Altered Carbon. But then there's the rest:

1. He has. This. Really annoying. Use. Of. Periods. To show pauses. Or something. Which is not only distracting but also makes it hard to parse. The sentences. Hey. Richard. Try an. Ellipsis. Or. A More...

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan is, yet another, strange book! I listened to the un-abridged audio book. This is the third book by Morgan I have listened too.

Altered Carbon was the beginning of "this world". In Broken Angels, we continue with "the world" and the same main character. Morgan has defined a universe of planets with strange technologies. The key technology is that a person's whole "being" (person) is stored in a "stack" (think of it like a memory card). A stack can be moved from b More...

Richard K Morgan's first book, Altered Carbon introduced us to Takeshi Kovacs, a bitter cynic with a heart of gold and the best psychosocial training humanity has been able to muster in this post-cyberpunk setting. In Broken Angels Takeshi comes back thirty years later as a lieutenant in Wedge's Wolves, a notoriously "effective" mercenary army involved on the interplanetary force's side of a recently colonized planet's war for independance. While getting put back together on a causualty ship aft More...

Lekkie zaskoczenie zmianą konwencji - nie mamy tym razem do czynienia z kryminałem (chociaż w tle przewija się zgrabnie zaplanowana intryga), ale formalnie powieść ta jest czymś zbliżonym stylistycznie do heist movie. Oczywiście, po raz kolejny wszystko opiera się na kanwie mieszanki hard science-fiction z cyberpunkiem, ale wszystko w proporcjach zjadliwych nawet dla osób, których kontakt z tą dziedziną fantastyki mógłby odstręczać.

Takeshi Kovacs, już po lekturze pierwszego tomu serii stał się j More...

I love science fiction, but military science fiction isn't my first choice. However I am willing to go along with the military aspect if the characters and the setting are interesting and compelling. In the case of Broken Angels they simply weren't. The main character, ex-Envoy Takeshi Kovacs, who was interesting in the first book, Altered Carbon, becomes little more than a fighting machine who thinks about sex a lot in Angels. In addition, the fascinating technology that frames all three of the More...

The second go-around with the sci-fi-plus-film-noir combo that made Altered Carbon such a fun read. Morgan tries to dodge the curse of second-album-itis by replacing the murder mystery plot with grand scale military sci-fi, complete with space battles and lost Martian civilizations. Mostly this works, although the book comes off a quite a bit more political than the first and with a much higher body count.

He also pulls off a pretty good final page switcheroo, which is always a lot harder than yo More...

Not nearly as good as the first book, Broken Angels takes Richard K. Morgan's badass hero and places him on a new planet with all new problems to deal with. Admirably, Morgan doesn't rely too heavily on the intriguing idea he came up with in his first book, Altered Carbon--that people can be killed and brought back to life as long as their "stack" (basically, a backup drive at the base of your skull where your consciousness can be kept) survives. That's just another plot element in this story, r More...

"Somewhere, a baby was crying."

I love how that sets the whole atmosphere for chapter three. Just that one simple sentence to start things off. I've read all three Kovacs novels and loved each one of them for very different reasons. I'd have to say that Woken Furies is my favorite, but Broken Angels comes in a close second. Altered Carbon was a fantastic introduction to the series, the character and the world, but it's not really a true representation of who and what Kovacs is. (That's my opinion More...

Not as good as Altered Carbon. Altered Carbon was great because it was set in various locales, each with their own unique atmosphere, it had a selection of interesting characters each with different personality traits and various shades of grey ethics, and it had a great plot.
Broken Angels had less of all these things. The plot didn't hold my attention as much, the characters were all fairly annoying (Kovacs included, this time... he seems to alternate between being generally angry, and being ge More...

This is the second Takeshi Kovacs novel I read, and it bears almost no resemblance to the first one. The first one is a detective mystery and this one is like a King Solomon's Mines-type adventure story. Sure, the sci-fi in the universe is the same, and Kovacs is the same kind of ruthless bastard he was in the first, but they really are two totally different books. I have read another Richard K. Morgan novel, The Steel Remains, and it was yet a THIRD type of book, a Lord-of-the-Rings-but-the-her More...

I like the main character of these books. I like the world that's created and its technology. In this book, Morgan began exploring more of the different philosophies of the 25th century Earth, explaining that we got a lot of the technology from a much more advanced Martian civilization. There are a lot of debates about whether or not we're 'ready' for the technology or if we need to have developed it ourselves to get to the point where we can be 'trusted' with it. While a bit cliche as a concept More...

Ultimately a real letdown after Altered Carbon. The first two-thirds are entertaining, as we get to know Kavocs as cynical mercenary soldier now that he's left behind his earlier life as a kind of hard-boiled detective. The middle part of the book takes place in a setting you'd never expect, and what happens there is more than interesting enough to keep you going.

Where the book falls down--badly--is in the act that follows, where an act of incredible cruelty (even by the standards of Kovacs worl More...

I really needed some sci-fi to read when I picked up Broken Angels. I had previously read Altered Carbon and was thinking this sequel would be as thoughtful. It turned out to be a fun read, with a few new devices to think about: Angel-like creatures from a Mars civilization that had spread across the universe, then vanished.

I liked the speculation on how corporations, future archeologists, and mercenaries each would fit into their roll. Some interesting ideas were proposed. There is violence in More...