Broken Angels
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But when it comes to taking sides, the only one Kovacs is ever really on is his own. So when a rogue pilot and a sleazy corporate fat cat offer him a lucrative role in a treacherous treasure hunt, he's only too happy to go AWOL with a band of resurrected soldiers of fortune. All that stands between them and the ancient alien spacecraft they mean to salvage are a massacred city bathed in deadly radiation, unleashed nanotechnolgy with a million ways to kill, and whatever surprises the highly advanced Martian race may have in store. But armed with his genetically engineered instincts, and his trusty twin Kalashnikovs, Takeshi is ready to take on anything...and let the devil take whoever's left behind.
- Listening Length16 hours and 8 minutes
- Audible release dateJune 16, 2005
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB0009Y3PXG
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Broken Angels' premise is Takeshi Kovacs is now a Lieutenant in the private military company of Carrera's Wedges. He's well-liked by everyone, which is somewhat mystifying since he's an absolutely awful military commander who snubs the men under his command as well as his superiors constantly. Blame it on Envoy training, I guess. After a particularly nasty battle, he's approached by a pilot named Schneider who claims to have a lead on a intact Martian spaceship that could elevate humanity's technological capacity by centuries.
Forming a ragtag bunch of misfits from soldiers waiting to be re-sleeved (essentially, resurrected), he rescues a lovely archaeologist from a prison camp and heads after the ultimate prize. It's a good book, halfway between Three Kings and Apocalypse Now in Space. However, it does have one flaw: Takeshi Kovacs is a completely unlikable *******. It's always a balance with antiheroes as you never want to make them so awful the audience doesn't care what happens to them or too good as it costs them their edge. Here, Takeshi's actions really undermine the idea we should give a **** what happens to him.
His constant betrayals, put-downs of anyone who believes in anything, and the fact he's solely motivated by money in an exceptionally brutal civil war make you question why we should care whether he succeeds or not. By the end, when he's engaged in a murderous rampage of retribution, I was actually hoping someone grabbed his stack (cybernetic memory recorder) and fried it.
Personally, I don't think Richard Morgan meant to create a villain protagonist but I think he successfully did so. I don't mind a good villain protagonist either which is part of what I think the point of this book is. To quote J.R.R Tolkien: "We were all orcs in the Great War." Takeshi Kovacs just wants out of the conflict on Sanction IV and he's willing to kill anybody he has to in order to do it. That's perhaps not the most sympathetic of goals but it is certainly an understandable one.
Richard K. Morgan has a engrossing horrific vision of war in the future. The savagery of conflict coupled with new and terrifying technological devices. It's a sobering idea that you can have a massive technological like the corporations and their mercenaries do but none of this will make the slightest bit of difference if the enemy is sufficiently determined. Neither side is portrayed as justified with atrocities having built up on both sides. The characters are all well-developed with the only problem I had being it was sometimes difficult to keep up with all of them thanks to the large number of Takeshi's recruits.
I will say the romance, if you can call it that, between Takeshi and Tanya is more compelling than the one between Takeshi and Kristan Ortega in the original novel. After rescuing her from the prison camp, Takeshi manages to help treat her PTSD with Envoy techniques but it results in her falling in a mixture of love and lust with him. We get to see how sex is affected by perfectly simulated virtual reality as well as how mutable loyalties can be with Envoy training. I also think she was an extremely compelling character and ranks with the religious corporate Matthias Hand as two of my favorites in the series.
Do I recommend this book as much as Altered Carbon? Not quite. I think it has some benefits over the original like better sex scenes and a more powerful backdrop with the war but Takeshi is less likable in this environment while the other characters tend to be sleazier. In a very real way, solving a Methuselah's murder is more compelling than finding a lost piece of Martian space junk. Still, I very much enjoyed the book and am glad I read it.
9/10
Where Altered Carbon was a neo-noir mystery, Broken Angels is military science fiction. Still, Broken Angels has the same dark, edgy feel as that first TAKESHI KOVACS novel. The technologies that Mr. Morgan first explains in Altered Carbon continue to be a key element of this series. Technological and scientific advances that should improve quality of life only grant those in authority more power over the masses. Science has defeated death, but immortality has made human life into little more than an abundant commodity. That life is cheap is a heavy theme throughout the story.
Landscapes littered with dusty colossal industrial hulks, oppressive corporations, ultra-deadly military weaponry, globe-encompassing war, and weird alien relics are all elements that serve to create a grim far-future for mankind. The realization that the universe is full of unknown terrors that can at any moment swallow us up like we never existed is horrifying.
There isn't a single character in this story that I could say is likable. It's almost unsettling how Morgan can still make them charismatic. Takeshi Kovacs himself frowns -- just a little bit -- on the senselessness of wholesale slaughter but won't hesitate to kill and kill again. Although they are in a shaky alliance, Matthias Hand serves as Kovacs' nemesis in this book. As the ultimate corporate ass, Hand would be a character that I have personal reasons to hate, but he becomes one of my favorites in the book. Almost all the team members have intriguing personalities and pasts that lend unique perspectives to the events.
Broken Angels might be righteously accused of overkill. Multiple climactic events slightly confuse the flow, as if it's really two books instead of one. The casualty rate may make it a contender for a fiction world record. Don't ask me who the good guys are, because I'm still not sure. The biggest hurdle Broken Angels may have is that it's just so dark that many readers may find it depressing. However, this reader didn't have any of those problems.
So what if it reads a little like it's more than one book? What can I say? Broken Angels is a bargain. Planet-wide warfare with futuristic weapons and the ability to bring 90% of dead soldiers back to life would make the violence unimaginable. Personally, I think good guys are overrated -- but if one is needed, I choose Kovacs. True, he's in my top five list of the most pissed-off fictional characters of all time, but he's got good reason. Plus, you have to admire a man that sticks to a code of honor, even if it's his own, slightly skewed one.
Regarding the pervasive doom-and-gloom in Broken Angels, I managed to find a candle-flicker in the blackness. Just like in Altered Carbon, Morgan sneaks in profound musings about what it is to be human. I took heart in finding that even in our grim far-flung future, when science can deliver what only religion promised before, faith survives. Many of the people in this story still believe in a supreme being and take comfort in that knowledge. Kovacs may or may not buy into it himself, but with his authority issues, his opinions are understandable.
Besides, how can you not love a guy who sticks it to the man every chance he gets?
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Weswegen ich dem Buch keine 5 sondern nur 4 Sterne gebe liegt daran, dass die Marsianer um die es ja hauptsächlich in Broken Angels geht irgendwie vollkommen ab vom Schuss sind und überhaupt nicht zu Morgans Stil passen, der sich ja schon an logisch möglichen Szenarien orientiert. Irgendwie werde ich die ganze Zeit das Gefühl nicht los, dass sich Morgan eher mit Technik und IT beschäftigt hat, aber weniger damit, was momentan (zu unserer Zeit) astronomisch los ist. Ich meine, es gibt ja schon Rover auf dem Mars und HD Aufnahmen von der Oberfläche. Und da hat noch niemand irgendwas entdeckt. Zudem war der Mars nur für kurze Zeit ein habitabler Planet. Eine so hochentwickelte Spezies wie die Marsianer hätte ja dann wohl eher die Erde kolonisiert und nicht einen Planeten, der von vornherein verdammt war. Es hätte mich jetzt weniger gestört, wenn das nur am Rande alles erwähnt worden wäre, aber das ganze Buch handelt ja davon.
Allerdings muss man ihm auch zugestehen, dass die Rover erst gestartet sind, als er bereits mit seinem ersten Buch fertig war und die Theorie von den Marsianern bereits entwickelt hatte.
Na ja, ich hab's jetzt einfach so hingenommen und bin schon beim dritten Buch... :-)
But it has left me with some mixed feelings. Morgan has retained his popular touch, deftly combining dialogue and description in the correct proportions with technological detail and backgrounds of worlds and organisations. A feel slightly reminiscent of cyberpunk, and going back a little further, Blade Runner, pervades this book much like its predecessor. As the plot twists and turns pleasantly, and the various well-rounded characters engage in intrigue and backstabbing, my eyes are kept glued to the page. The quality of the writing is superb.
Yet for me this book is not as accomplished as the first. There are fewer real surprises as the main thrust of the book - the discovery of an alien artifact - is revealed early on and remains a static objective throughout, while Takeshi's character seems even more cynical than before, and strangely devoid of hope throughout the proceedings. Even the various love interests fall a little flat.
Still, ultimately these are forgiveable faults and for me 'Broken Angels' still falls in the "ripping yarn" category ... the only real question mark has to be about the level of violence. This is substantially up on the last book, as you might expect since this one is set in and around a futuristic warzone where people regularly exchange bodies old for new. There is one not-strictly-plot-necessary torture scene and quite a few very graphic sequences, and for me it goes a little too far, approaching Ian M. Banks' darkest moments.
Recommended, but for the (very) unsqueamish only.
What Morgan did do with the plot of the second Takeshi Kovacs novel, was, in many respects, completely different to its predecessor. Altered Carbon is effectively a twisted sci-fi noire detective novel set in Bay City, Earth. Broken Angels is [mostly] set on a planet called Sanction IV, many light years from humanity's birthplace. Sanction IV is struck with a crippling global war, in which Takeshi Kovacs is a hired mercenary in a company called The Wedge. Morgan takes you on a wartime journey through the cut-throat commercial world and deep into the history of an extinct alien race with devastating personal consequences for our cast (and many other unfortunates.) It is impressive and awe-inspiring.
The pace of Broken Angels does not match that of Altered Carbon, and, frankly, I would have been surprised if it had. This novel is a very different creature. The first half is a relatively sedate ride, with lots of hidden going-ons that are mostly well hidden. Once you tip the crest of the wave things become much more turbulent and you are once more dragged kicking and screaming into the dark and brutal inner mind of the sociopathic ex-envoy Takeshi Kovacs.
The familiar behaviours of our protagonist are all in here. His proclivity towards extreme violence and mass murder, his twisted sense of justice through vengeance, general outrage and near-obsessive rejection of authority (particularly daddy-figures) all play their part. There are some explicit sex scenes, but they are reigned in compared to Altered Carbon and justifiably so, given the nature of the storyline.
I keep on comparing Broken Angels to Altered Carbon, and that is perhaps because Altered Carbon was so. Freaking. Excellent. For me, Broken Angels wasn't quite on the same level as its predecessor, but that doesn't mean it isn't a damn fine read. If I hadn't read Altered Carbon, I would be raving about how amazing Broken Angels is. Morgan's ability to explore his characters' personalities and bring them to life so vividly is nothing short of brilliant, and it is what makes his books so good.
I'm rating Broken Angels at 5 stars, simply because I can't physically rate it at 4.5 stars on amazon. I would rather round it up than down. It's going onto my list of all-time favourite sci-fi reads, alongside Donaldson's Gap Sequence and Reynolds' Revelation Space series. And now I'm going to download the third and final Takeshi Kovacs novel, because I can't read anything else knowing that there is one more to go. It's just that sort of series.
Yet Morgan's second outing has met with a fair amount of criticism leveled at under-developed ideas or poor style. Both criticisms are unfair and miss the point of what the novel is trying to achieve. 'Altered Carbon' introduced us to ideas of sleeving, cortical stacks and humans being decanted into either real or virtual worlds. Morgan takes this much further in 'Broken Angels' and asks us to think about what will happen to human beings who live at the interface of technologcal developments, and how that technology will affect both what we are as persons as well as our own sense of who we are. The brilliance of 'Broken Angels' is that he asks us these questions via the characters who are working at and in extreme situations where the rules of who we are are constantly being redrawn all the time. And he does it by using the Martians (the Broken Angels of the title) as a mirror of civilisation so far ahead of us, yet still seemingly sharing the same weaknesses and vices.
This is the clue to the style and why he sometimes writes in very short, staccato sentences. As some reviewers have noted he does. Sometimes write. Like. This. But all you have to do is look closely; he only does it when people are speaking. And usually, he only does it when people are speaking under incredibly stressful circumstances or life and death situations. In these situations, people rarely speak in complete sentences. They speak short, quick-fire and often incomplete sentences. This is what Morgan does here - his writing mirrors the reality of the way we speak when stressed and the characters are much more realistic because of it.
All in all, this book is a welcome return for Kovacs. The character is so much more developed and, for once, we get to see the man's inner thoughts and processes which helps us understand quite how he does what he does and how future genetic conditioning can take human beings in all sorts of unexpected directions. Brilliant, insightful, and highly entertaining. Well worth every penny.















