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—other than the core conceit of Takeshi's universe, the cortical stack technology that allows human personalities to be backed up and transferred from body to body, like files on a network—were kept mostly offstage.

For Broken Angels, Takeshi Kovacs returns to a role and a milieu that are more familiar to him, if less so to the reader: he's a soldier again, resleeved in a custom-built military clone based on a Maori template, fighting alongside Carrera's Wedge on a colony world called Sanction Four that's in the middle of a war between oppressive vested interests and a bloody-minded rebel named Joshua Kemp whose methods borrow more than a little from the Khmer Rouge, back on little ole Earth. Neither side is especially likeable—it's hard to tell who the angels are when most everyone is broken. Kovacs is also not alone on this trip... he's part of a team this time, fellow soldiers who admire Kovacs' cool and rely on his Envoy training and abilities. He definitely seems more in his element here—more self-assured, perhaps, than as the isolated hero of Altered Carbon. But he is also a less sympathetic character, less open to others (mostly) and even more inclined, it seems, to dark cynicism and the kind of violence that leads to Real Death.

The setting is darker too, matching Kovacs' mood. There's a scene not too far in when we see workers shoveling up piles of cortical stacks taken from casualties of the war, weighed and sold by the kilogram to the highest bidder... with no way to know how many of them would ever be resleeved. That image stuck with me... even in a technological wonderland where physical immortality is a real possibility, we just can't seem to keep from piling up the body counts.


This broadening of venue and focus definitely changes the tone of the sequel—where Altered Carbon evoked detective fiction, Broken Angels harks back more to classic caper flicks like The Wild Bunch or Ocean's Eleven. You've seen this outline before: a charismatic outlaw assembles a high-powered team of mavericks to follow a complex plan, racing against the clock to accomplish a specific not-quite-legal goal with a big payoff at the end.

Along the way there are betrayals and losses, revelations both personal and cosmic, bloody battles and the occasional—very occasional—quiet interlude... Morgan, as Kovacs, has lost none of his touch for the sardonic turn of phrase at the advent of a firefight.

We find out more about the mysterious "Martians" here as well, those long-vanished Ancient Ones (who probably didn't really come from Mars, of course) who were no more than a bit of background detail and a few archaeological trinkets in Altered Carbon. The caper in this case involves a Martian artifact that just happens to be in the hottest part of the war zone on Sanction Four, an item that makes a satisfying and most logical MacGuffin.


The same, but different. If you liked the first, you'll like the second, if you approach it in the right frame of mind... and you might just like the third, too. The saga of Takeshi Kovacs continues in Woken Furies.