Another good entry in Morgan's Kovacs series

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	• Woken Furies: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel Richard K. Morgan Del Rey, 2007 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Another good entry in Morgan's Kovacs series

I really enjoyed this novel, which is the third in Richard K. Morgan's series about a mercenary, Takeshi Kovacs, who lives in a far future where personalities are digitized, stored in metal canisters called "stacks," and downloaded into a series of "sleeves," or bodies. Although this novel does not have as profound an impact as the first in the series, Altered Carbon, it is a big improvement over the second book, Broken Angels, in terms of plotting and the cast of secodary characters.

This time, Kovacas is back on his home planet, Harlan's World, where the "first families" -- decendents of the original settlers from a dying Earth -- are running a repressive oligarchy that (what else is new?) lives off the backs of average workers. It has been centuries since the workers rose up in revolt, originally led by the mythical Quellcrist Falconer, a sort of female Che Guevarra figure. Now, it appears, Falconer is back, having been digitized and stored for almost 200 years in a data dump somewhere in the depths of a Harlan's World stack warehouse. Kovacs runs into Falconer and, skeptical though he is, eventually finds himself helping her and the descendants of her followers challenge the first families' dominance of his home planet.

There are lots of sidelights in the plot, including a group of surfers who are underground Quellists, Japanese yakuza gangsters and their Slavic equivalents called "haiduchi," and a bunch of "deComms," who are teams of young risk-takers that go around disarming war machines left over from the last time that Quellcrist Falconer led a revolt against the first families. While all of this may sound a bit confusing, it is not; in fact, the plot lines make perfect sense and are totally believable, which I would argue is the single most important mark of a great science fiction story.

Morgan's characters are well drawn and his attention to detail is impressive, particularly in the way he provides realistic explanations for things such as the weather patterns on a planet that is 98% water and has two moons. He endows Harlan's World with interesting plant and wildlife too, such as the swamp panthers that are raised to fight one another to their deaths in gladiator-like pits run by haiduchi, or the formidable ripwings, which are reptile-like creatures that fly pteradactyl style around "the World" preying on mountain climbers and other unwary humans.

The novel ends in a perfect set up for the next installment in the adventures of Takeshi Kovacs and the presumptive Quellcrist Falconer -- Is it really Quell, or is this personality a mere trace copy left floating around in the planetary data banks? Will Takeshi ever find the stack of his great love, Sarah, who may be drifting somewhere at the bottom of the Harlan's World sea? Are the ultra-high tech Martians still alive and, if so, where are they? Can a far-future mercenary find happiness in a cheap, synthetic sleeve without neurochem and a gecko gene splice for climbing cliff faces? Some, or perhaps even all, of this will be revealed in the next installment, which I hope comes very soon. Kovacs is addictive, and Morgan a welcome supplier of top flight story-telling.

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Better than a Micky Nozawa experia flick

I'd been waiting for quite a while to read this third entry in Richard K. Morgan's series of Takeshi Kovacs novels. It was worth the wait, and in some respects it may be the best of the series so far. Tak travels through some dark, dark territory here.

Don't be fooled (or put off) by the pace. Where _Altered Carbon_ was a rapid series of body blows, _Woken Furies_ is more like being dragged down very slowly by a very large weight. There's a lot going on here, but quite a bit of it is in the background and between the lines. If you don't get into Tak's head pretty early on, the novel may read like a travelogue.

Not that that's necessarily _bad_. Probably a lot of us were curious about Harlan's World, and we get to see quite a bit of it here. We also finally get to put faces (the faces of their current sleeves, anyway) with some familiar names from Tak's past. All of that will probably be interesting enough to entertain the casual reader.

But if that's all you get out of this novel, then you're missing the meat of it.

The surface-level plot opens with Tak on Harlan's World in a synthetic sleeve, trying to get back into his own body. He's also, as we gradually discover, on some sort of mission, the details of which we don't really learn until some 250 pages in. And not too far into the tale, we meet someone who just _might_ turn out to be Quellcrist Falconer . . . or maybe not. Furthermore, Tak is being pursued by a younger version of himself, decanted from a backup copy he didn't know existed. Things build toward a final revelation with implications far, far beyond Quellism and the local politics of Harlan's World.

The pace, though, is generally slow. Oh, things do happen (and people start dying horribly within the first twenty-odd pages), but a lot of the action is off-screen. We spend the bulk of the novel the way we spent most of _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_: Going Somewhere.

The really interesting stuff, and the real, behind-the-narrative content of the novel, is what happens to Tak. I'm not going to give you any more clues about this; I'm just going to warn you to listen with both ears as those titular furies awaken and the possibilities of redemption come and go. There's a lot of internal turmoil going on here, and Tak isn't necessarily going to tell you about it directly. Hell, despite his Envoy training, I'm not sure he's even fully aware of all of it himself.

Readers who keep wanting recycled versions of _Altered Carbon_ will continue to be disappointed, as they were with _Broken Angels_; Morgan clearly isn't going to keep rewriting the same book for us. Now, me, I think that's a good thing.

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A satisfying wrap up to a great series

If you have enjoyed Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, then you will enjoy Woken Furies. If you have not read the first two, it is recommended for although this isn't a directly sequential trilogy, the first two books set up Morgan's universe and Woken Furies will read easier and make more sense with the first two books under your belt.

That said, Woken Furies ends the Kovac's books (at least according to Morgan). Morgan ends his small group, military tactical operations novel series by expanding the scope to events with implications throughout the Protectorate. Kovac's has to grapple with his inner demons while dodging an onslaught of yakuza, military and religious opponents. In the end, Kovacs' attempt to become something more than an ex-Envoy criminal, and his struggle against his own pessimism, lifts this novel from what would otherwise be a typical SF adventure novel.

Like the previous books, there's a brain and a heart here. Recommended for readers who enjoyed the previous novels and whose looking for fast-paced SF adventure with more brains than average.

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Enjoy the ride!

Woken Furies is fast paced romp'n'stomp across Takeshi Kovacs' home, Harlan's World. The author, Richard K. Morgan, has spent probably more time in this book than in his previous on world building. We learn a great deal about Harlan's World, Kovacs' earlier life there, and about the mysterious Martians.

I won't replay the plot or character bits here, they are in the publisher's notes and in other reviews. I agree with some other reviews that the emphasis and content in this book does differ from the previous two incarnations. However - I found it a natural and perfect complement to the other volumes. From the first two books you're left really wanting to know both more about Kovacs and the universe in which he lives. Morgan is one of the absolute best, and perhaps the best of his time, at interlacing world-building detail in his narative in a fluid, almost off-handed manner. The background is rich and multi-dimensional. That tapesty is vividly filled in in this book, while successfully whetting your appetite for more. The path he took in this novel was quite deliberate, as you can find in this interview from before Furies was completed (http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345457714&view=printqa, read down to the bottom). The other reviewers who chafed at Morgan challenging them should stick to Kevin Anderson, Steven King, and whoever is writing Star Trek novels this week.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, page 9, 10, 11, 12

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