Woken Furies: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel [Paperback]

Richard K. Morgan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 29, 2007

Richard K. Morgan has received widespread praise for his astounding twenty-fifth-century novels featuring Takeshi Kovacs, and has established a growing legion of fans. Mixing classic noir sensibilities with a searing futuristic vision of an age when death is nearly meaningless, Morgan returns to his saga of betrayal, mystery, and revenge, as Takeshi Kovacs, in one fatal moment, joins forces with a mysterious woman who may have the power to shatter Harlan’s World forever.

Once a gang member, then a marine, then a galaxy-hopping Envoy trained to wreak slaughter and suppression across the stars, a bleeding, wounded Kovacs was chilling out in a New Hokkaido bar when some so-called holy men descended on a slim beauty with tangled, hyperwired hair. An act of quixotic chivalry later and Kovacs was in deep: mixed up with a woman with two names, many powers, and one explosive history.

In a world where the real and virtual are one and the same and the dead can come back to life, the damsel in distress may be none other than the infamous Quellcrist Falconer, the vaporized symbol of a freedom now gone from Harlan’s World. Kovacs can deal with the madness of AI. He can do his part in a battle against biomachines gone wild, search for a three-centuries-old missing weapons system, and live with a blood feud with the yakuza, and even with the betrayal of people he once trusted. But when his relationship with “the” Falconer brings him an enemy specially designed to destroy him, he knows it’s time to be afraid.

After all, the guy sent to kill him is himself: but younger, stronger, and straight out of hell.

Wild, provocative, and riveting, Woken Furies is a full-bore science fiction spectacular of the highest order–from one of the most original and spellbinding storytellers at work today.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Morgan's powerful third cyberpunk noir SF novel to feature Takeshi Kovacs, whose consciousness is transferred from one ultra–combat-ready body to another in the service of various unscrupulous powers, the interstellar mercenary returns home to Harlan's World, thoroughly pissed and dangerous. Despite his justified cynicism, he finds himself trying to protect a young woman who may house the soul of a martyred revolutionary from centuries earlier. He also must fight a hired killer who's a younger version of himself. To succeed, he has to sift through his past to see which allies and memories he can trust. Morgan has become even more nervy since winning the Philip K. Dick Award for his confident first novel, Altered Carbon (2003). This book develops a baroque, appallingly complicated setting, full of opportunities for revelation and betrayal. Both violence and sex are troweled on thickly but appropriately; they have significant consequences for these people who are trying—in circumstances even more desperate than our own—to discover who they really are and who they might have a chance to become.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Following Altered Carbon (2003) and Broken Angels (2004), Morgan's anxiously awaited third Takeshi Kovacs novel makes a terrific addition to an award-winning series. This time Morgan takes a giant leap into the cyberpunk future that William Gibson begin exploring 20 years ago. Unlike Gibson, however, Morgan combines the cyberpunk style with a fast-paced, first-person narrative that is as evocative of classic hard-boiled detective fiction as it is of cutting-edge science fiction. His protagonist, Kovacs, a futuristic version of a ronin ("for hire") samurai, is back on his home planet, Harlan's World. The ruling Harlan family awakens Kovacs from digital storage into a newly constructed body and launches him on a mission that weaves a dangerous course through labyrinthine politics and murderous hardware. But Kovacs also has his own agenda. Vengeance and a quest for a long-lost love continually put his loyalties into conflict with his powerful and ruthless new employers, in a future where death may or may not be forever. Highly recommended for followers of the series, cyberpunk devotees, and hard-boiled detective fans not averse to a little genre-bending. Elliott Swanson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; Reprint edition (May 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345499778
• ISBN-13: 978-0345499776
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (93 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Morgan was, until his writing career took off, a tutor at Strathclyde University in the English Language Teaching division. He has travelled widely and lived in Spain and Istanbul. He is a fluent Spanish speaker.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 102 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than a Micky Nozawa experia flick November 14, 2005

By John S. Ryan

Format:Hardcover

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.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Worst narration I have ever heard. May 17, 2011

By I. Brown

Format:Audio CD

The book itself is pretty good, I'm not knocking the book. It's just that the narration in this audio book version is terrible. I travel a lot for work and took to listening to audio books and I am saying this is actually the worst one I have ever heard.

The first two books, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels are narrated by Todd McLaren and he does an amazing job. I HIGHLY recommend these two audio books.

William Dufris cannot stack up next to Todd, but that's not even the problem. The whole first part of the book is in italics and several flashbacks to old advice throughout the book are also in italics. To indicate that to you, they distort the audio with an echo effect that makes it grating and downright infuriating to listen to. They didn't do that for the other two books, what made them think it was a good idea this time around? Fine whatever it's only a tiny fraction of the book. But then Dufris mispronounces the protagonist's name. The main character in the book makes a point of noting how to pronounce his name in the first two novels, several times. Dufris is supposed to BE the main character, make me believe he is Takeshi Kovacs and here he is blatantly mispronouncing his own name. Words cannot describe how annoying it is.

One of Dufris's other failings is the occasional screw up of cadence and tone of the character, but that's mostly in the beginning. It's like he didn't read the book before he narrated it; he certainly didn't read the first two books or he wouldn't have screwed up the protagonist's name.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Opportunity Missed August 29, 2009

By Alvin J. Daniel

Format:Paperback

(Some spoilers)

First, the things I thought were well done
1) Slick, terrific prologue. Sets the stage for fireworks to come.
2) Some great concepts. The decom idea is fantastic (Jurassic Park for war machines), or battling with your younger self.

I wanted to like this book, having read altered carbon and its sequel. But it falls flat on characterization, and I even prefer action to characterization in my novels. He spends 100 pages developing a core group of characters only to have them go poof with nothing more than a cursory one-liner from another character about their fates. The main story motivations for the protagonist like why he wants revenge on the church, or why he becomes angry with the neo-Quellists both turn on two barely characterized individuals (Sarah and Isa). Why are they so important? Here was material for gripping reading, but he only spends 1-2 paragraphs on each, completely out of proportion to how much impact they have on the protagonists actions. Midway through the book, yet another core group of characters get introduced. Do I care at this point? Will they suffer the same one-line fate as the first group? Really, they exist simply as props. Even the antagonists are simply not characterized. There are almost no immediate scenes with them.

Even the main attraction, the battle with his younger self is wasted. Again, this would seem to be material for intense dialog and action. Instead they trade a few barbed quips with each other at the few points when they actually do meet, hardly the stuff of drama.

There are other problems, like too much authorial intrusion to provide social commentary. I wouldn't mind if there was a gripping story, but without one I found myself skipping swaths of text to get back to the main thread.

Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed his earlier books I don't think I will be going back to this author. There are simply too many other good reads out there.