Woken Furies (Takeshi Kovacs Novels) (Hardcover)

by Richard K. Morgan (Author)
Key Phrases: foot sweepers, cortical stacks, grav sled, Sierra Tres, New Hok, Virginia Vidaura (more...)

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.

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; First Edition edition (September 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345479718
• ISBN-13: 978-0345479716
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #330,161 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 78 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 "Scott Ryan" (Silver Lake, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'd give 6 stars if I could, September 29, 2005

By	... (elsewhere) - See all my reviews

I have to admit, I'm hooked. I can't get enough of Richard Morgan's distopian future. I was so eager to read Woken Furies that I arranged to get a copy from Great Britain (because it was released months earlier than in the US). I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Like Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, it treats you to a highly-charged whirlwind of a story centered on the activities of Takeshi Kovacs.
In this episode, a Yakuza family have hired an earlier version of himself to track him down. Complicating matters are a personal vendetta against a particularly vicious religious group, and a woman who may (or may not) be a re-embodied revolutionary named Quellcrist Falconer.
I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that you see more of Kovacs' humanity than in previous novels. NOT that Woken Furies is a "group-hug" kind of book. Far from it. In fact, Kovacs seems even more violent and misanthropic than in the first two books. However, we understand "why" a bit more and we see more of the effects 2 centuries of war and crime have had on him.
Kovacs has firmly established himself as my new favorite literary character. As in his other 2 Takeshi Kovacs novels, Richard Morgan gives us a character of suprising depth and humanity that is still capable of incredible savagery; in addition to a perfectly-realized vision of a future in which technology hasn't eliminated war or crime, but has grown with it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ten stars, at least!, October 10, 2005

By	Michael K. Smith (Gonzales, Louisiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

It's always a delight to find an author who creates characters in three dimensions instead of the more usual two; Morgan seems to stretch his people to five or six. This is the third novel in the series about Takeshi Kovacs, ex-Envoy, stone killer, freelance renegade, and very dangerous man to be on the wrong side of. It's been three centuries, objective time, and Kovacs is back on Harlan's World, where he originally came from. It's also been a couple of centuries since the Resettlement, the failed Quellist revolution that gave the Harlan family oligarchy a run for its money, and Kovacs -- who only wants to continue killing fundamentalist priests (it's personal) -- finds himself caught up, first, in the attempt to reclaim the nanoware-drenched continent the revolution produced, and, later, in a new revolutionary plot. Because it's part of Quell's teachings, that when things go against you, you retreat and you wait -- for generations, if necessary. But now, just maybe, Quellquist Falconer might be back, in the flesh. But that's just this novel's top-level plot. There's also Kovacs's vendetta against those who let die the only woman who mattered to him -- Real Death, no resleeving. And there's his longstanding relationships with the several criminal cultures of Harlan's World, and with his old Envoy trainer. Not to even mention being hunted by a younger, smart-assed version of himself. And, just out of sight, there are the vanished Martians, about whom we learned a lot in Morgan's second book, Broken Angels. There's military and political philosophy here, all of it cynical, there's imaginative anthropology, there's a certain amount of gruff sex, there are some great quotes, there's considerable death (some deserved, some not), and there are breath-grabbing battle scenes like you haven't read in years. Morgan's second Kovacs novel was twice as good as his first. This one is three times as good as his second. If this one doesn't win both the Hugo and the Nebula, there's no justice. But, hey -- Kovacs already knows that.

PS -- I was astonished a previous reviewer compared this to Bester's _The Stars My Destination_. A great book, don't get me wrong (I even own a First Edition copy of it), but Gully Foyle is pretty and pale and poetic beside the dark and blistering Takeshi Kovacs!