James's review
Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan
The followon to Altered Carbon. This book sends Kovacs to war, and confronts the legacy of the Martians head on.
The Martians, as they were introduced in Altered Carbon, were a race of sentient birdlike creatures, that have, apparently, been long extinct by the time their relics were discovered on Mars. Now a new archeological find in the middle of a war zone has corporate players scrambling to find it, understand it, and exploit it as quickly as possible, and woe to anyone who gets in the way.
Long and harsh. It's a good, if bleak, story, though for all the length, for all the details we get about Kovacs' life that we didn't get in the first book, the characters aren't as vivid as in Altered Carbon, and when he says early on "it's the closest I came to a victory on Sanction IV" early on, he's not pissing about. There are damn few sympathetic characters in this story. Kovacs' brutal nature is more in evidence, and Morgan kills off most of the sympathetic characters wit...more
The Martians, as they were introduced in Altered Carbon, were a race of sentient birdlike creatures, that have, apparently, been long extinct by the time their relics were discovered on Mars. Now a new archeological find in the middle of a war zone has corporate players scrambling to find it, understand it, and exploit it as quickly as possible, and woe to anyone who gets in the way.
Long and harsh. It's a good, if bleak, story, though for all the length, for all the details we get about Kovacs' life that we didn't get in the first book, the characters aren't as vivid as in Altered Carbon, and when he says early on "it's the closest I came to a victory on Sanction IV" early on, he's not pissing about. There are damn few sympathetic characters in this story. Kovacs' brutal nature is more in evidence, and Morgan kills off most of the sympathetic characters wit...more
