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Jun 01, 2011

Jamie rated it:

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 c More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 17, 2011

Melissa rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 22, 2008

Jason rated it:

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 t More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2012

Kieran rated it:

There's two things wrong with Sci Fi. Ridiculous oneupmanship permeates the genre, with each new author and each new book daring to create bigger better universes with more aliens and more technology and more fear and more intrigue and more confusion. And thats the other thing - confusion reigns when the author fails to employ subtlety. </p>

Altered Carbon suffered from neither of these and as such it was perfect. This follow up, Broken Angels isn't quite as succsseful. For a start it trie

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Sep 21, 2011

Bonnie rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 30, 2011

Lightreads rated it:

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...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 09, 2011

Mad rated it:

Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels have a stellar reputation among hard core science fiction fans. I have previously enjoyed reading 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 still maintaining the character's unlikeability. The themes of the first book, explicit sexuality, corporate greed, cap More...

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Apr 15, 2011

Alan rated it:

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. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 29, 2011

Tancredi rated it:

"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 affollatis

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Jun 24, 2010

Daniel rated it:

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 smatte More...

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Apr 26, 2010

Bertrand rated it:

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...

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Apr 04, 2010

Karina rated it:

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 minute More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 13, 2010

Gar rated it:

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 re More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 31, 2009

Heather rated it:

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. Ri More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 05, 2009

Jim rated it:

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 More...

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Sep 22, 2010

Brainycat rated it:

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 causualt More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2012

Rafal rated it:

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 More...

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May 05, 2010

Laura rated it:

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...

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Jun 07, 2011

Tim rated it:

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 More...

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Mar 09, 2009

Chris "Stu" rated it:

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 thi More...

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Sep 15, 2011

Ankush rated it:

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 bei More...

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Feb 13, 2011

Ben rated it:

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-he More...

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Feb 03, 2009

Kam Oi rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Sep 02, 2011

Lee rated it:

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 v More...

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Dec 16, 2009

Ron rated it:

Takeshi Kovacs, hardboiled mercenary, joins a plan to recover an alien starship, but its located between two fronts in a war where new types of (illegal) evolutionary nanoweapons are being used. A number of twists before the ending keep it fresh.

Morgan's writing about Kovacs is a bit more sympathetic in this novel, though the world he inhabits is just as brutal as Altered Carbon. Militaristic Noir?

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Nov 01, 2011

Miss rated it:

This was a different kind of story from the first book in the series. Altered Carbon made me feel like Raymond Chandler had risen from the grave to write sci-fi. The world of the book was futuristic sci-fi, but the tone of the book was pure hard-boiled detective murder mystery noir. This one is more hard sci-fi I think, though I can't claim to be totally conversant in the subtle distinctions of science fiction sub-categories. So, while the first book was more my kind of thing, this was also exce More...

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Sep 02, 2011

Gavin rated it:

I have a lot of respect for an author who will write a story without telling you what's going on until they are good and ready. I like someone who has obviously spent enough time planning and world-building on his own that he or she feels no need to spend the first third of a book boring me with it, and that is something Morgan mostly tries to do; explain the conceptual underpinnings of the thing rather than go into specifics of how it looks or works.

This works pretty well, and creates More...

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Feb 02, 2010

Boody rated it:

Some potentially interesting ideas again spoilt by the embarassing bad sex scenes and a main character who is super-powered Rambo in space. The detective story elements are gone but the worse bits of Altered Carbon are back and now comprise most of the story.

This time around, Kovac did have to deal with the repercussions of the fights he got into but sadly the author kept inventing magic pills or equipment to negate any issues and save Kovacs at the last minute. On top of this the r More...

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Oct 21, 2010

Andrzej rated it:

My least favourites of all Kovacs books. There are a lot of characters, who are all very similar: different special forces types, not much in the way of personality, and what's worse, they're all in different bodies than we initially meet them in. It's just hard to care about them, and that's apparently what the reader is supposed to do through the middle half of the book, when all action is virtually put on hold and we get to watch a dozen battle-hardened soldiers trade their life stories, poli More...

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Jan 23, 2011

April the Cheshire Meow rated it:

Radiation eats at the bodies throughout the book as an ongoing planet war eats at the souls. Anyone with feelings of righteous belief ends up with the ashes of their belief lying at their feet. Betrayal is endemic. Darker than the first in the series and I can see why some would stop here. Altered was an exploration of sexual decadence, this is an exploration of moral faith that lies behind much political hatred and manipulation. True believing leads to moral rot once you begin forcing everyone More...

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