Broken Angels: A Novel (Takeshi Kovacs)

Having purchased and read both "Broken Angels" and "Altered Carbon" based on recommendations and reviews here, I feel compelled to offer this. I found both books tense, original, and well written, however the author seems committed to including very explicit sex scenes that strike me as unnecessary and graphic to the point of pornography. Usually I pass on books to friends and my teenage children. These won't make the rounds and I'm honestly wondering if I'll even keep them in my collection. Too bad - Richard Morgan is an excellent writer otherwise with tremendous insight and compelling ideas.

Not as spectacular as the first book, but still a good read.
If this had been the first book I probably wouldn't have been back for more. I miss the feel of the first book, whatever that was. It was too long a go I read Altered carbon and now I just have a fuzzy, warm memory of it. Can't say the same for this one.

Morgan has created my favorite sci-fi hero ever. I've read a ton of sci-fi over the last few years (a personal project of mine; to have the ultimate sci-fi collection) and I can unequivocally say that Takeshi is the coolest character of them all! Rich K Morgan is one helluva great author.

It's hard to follow Altered Carbon (the first book in the series, which I highly recommend). The imagination behind this novel is impressive and the world is fully realized. The writing's good as well. It was a bit confusing at times and the last third (no spoilers) was at time hard to comprehend because of the immense challenge the author took in describing something that is, in essence, incomprehensible. Definitely worth reading if you like Altered Carbon, but not essential.

Book two of the series that started with Altered Carbon, the classic, I can't wait until someone makes the movie

EXCELLENT, great book great series, great idea of SciFI, I can absolutely believe the tech, and the world that is so richly detailed.

Mr. Morgan is a great writer, tremendous talent

Altered Carbon was great. Morgan created a universe that was unique and interesting, and then gave us a protagonist with a battered moral code, but one who cared about doing the right thing and helping people. In this book Kovacs is a selfish sociopath who cares about no one but himself. Maybe the author is arguing that is what the effect of constantly trading bodies would be. Perhaps. But it makes for a dislikable protagonist and makes one not care what happens to the characters. The book is also very slowly paced. It would have been twice as good in half the pages. Overall, a huge disappointment.

I enjoyed the book more at the beginning then the end...is why I gave it three stars. It started to really drag. The pace and description got so slow and repetitive I actual began reading the first and last line of each paragraph to get finished. I will wait awhile before I read the third.

This addition to the Kovacs novels seemed far more futuristic and less hackneyed blade runner noir than the first one. Played around a lot more with themes only barely introduced in Altered Carbon. Two problems. I hate the rapid-fire barrage of Sherlock Holmes puzzle-solving that happens at the end of each of these novels. It’s way too much to take in. I also hate the sex scenes. They seem really gratuitous and they never really add much to the plot. But overall, a fun and frightening journey into a future where humanity is totally different and depressingly the same all at once.

Some other reviewer found this book "dark and compelling".

I own up to the capital sin of having bought and read this book without having read the first volume, Altered Carbon.

However, I am afraid this does not make me believe any of the situations depicted in this book. It is not so much the gratuitous violence, probably a marketing gimmick, as the cardboard characters which are anything but three-dimensional: I cannot help thinking I am actually reading a manga (and I am not very fond of manga, either)...

Character seem to move about aimlessly, without any obvious drive. One wonders why do they act like they do.

The plot is not that interesting either, with the usual devices:

1. just in time;

2. people are not what they seem to be;

3. a hero will overcome most difficulties.

I read it through with lots of effort, as if I just wanted to get done with it.

No, this is not a masterpiece, nor is original, nor funny, nor anything one might possibly wish to read.

Some other reviewer found this book "dark and compelling".

I own up to the capital sin of having bought and read this book without having read the first volume, Altered Carbon.

However, I am afraid this does not make me believe any of the situations depicted in this book. It is not so much the gratuitous violence, probably a marketing gimmick, as the cardboard characters which are anything but three-dimensional: I cannot help thinking I am actually reading a manga (and I am not very fond of manga, either)...

Character seem to move about aimlessly, without any obvious drive. One wonders why do they act like they do.

The plot is not that interesting either, with the usual devices:

1. just in time;

2. people are not what they seem to be;

3. a hero will overcome most difficulties.

I read it through with lots of effort, as if I just wanted to get done with it.

No, this is not a masterpiece, nor is original, nor funny, nor anything one might possibly wish to read.

Absolutely boring. A whole lot of build up to nothing. Just talk talk talk. Had to power through until the end and was completely disappointed. It's hard to describe what a load of crap this book is. If you liked Altered Carbon, then stop there.

Nowhere near as good as Altered Carbon. The plot is not that great, and in the end anti-climactic. The staccato dialogue was very annoying where the characters never finish a sentence without being interrupted. The whole narrative about the extinct Martian civilization is quite frankly absurd. I'm sorry but Martians as a technologically advanced avian species? Give me a break. I'm currently reading the third installment of the Takeshi Kovacs series. I'll review it when done. Did I mention that Altered Carbon was great!? It was and I hear Netflix will soon start shooting a ten part series. I hope this actually happens and doesn't get cancelled by myopic, cheapskate producers. Who do I want to see play Takeshi Kovacs? Tom Cruise of course!

Altered Carbon introduced some interesting ideas. It was gory, but there was some decent characterization. This one is just fight scene after fight scene. Characterization is poor, plotting is poor, and there are too many "twists". A lot like the second Amber series in that sense; it gets hard to suspend your disbelief, and leaves you not caring what happens in the end.

I saw “Altered Carbon” on Netflix. I enjoyed the TV series, but I didn’t read the book. I took a chance and decided to read this book, the second in the book series.
There was none of the excitement, action, or interest in this book that was in the first book/Netflix series. I actually fell asleep several times while reading. I completely lost interest. I began to scan ahead in the hope that I could find an interesting place to start again.
Finally, I gave up.

So you've written one futuristic noir cyberpunk thriller that seems to be a hit with the kids, you've got a character that is capable of carrying multiple stories with his quick brain, quicker trigger finger and penchant for cynically crackin' wise, and an apparently boundless imagination for describing eviscerations by various means . . . if you're the imaginary version of Richard K Morgan that comes to me and asks me for advice, I would say keep cookie-cuttering these stories out and it'd be like printing money, which would be good for me because in my mind he'd be so grateful for the swell advice that he would send quite a bit of it my way.

Fortunately, I guess, for both his creative health and the health of his bank account, he decided to go with a slightly different scenario this time out. In fact, besides the overall setting and the presence of Takashi "I can turn a grocery store trip into a shootout" Kovacs, fans of the cyberpunk mystery of the first novel may find themselves on slightly shiftier ground here.

I know I was at first. Set about thirty years after the previous novel (newcomers will actually be okay starting here as there's very few references to "Altered Carbon", suggesting it was just another day at the office for our boy), this one features Kovacs apparently finding the detective thing too violent and instead going for something more suited to his skillset . . . joining a mercenary organization that is helping win a war, a war that features soldiers that can be shoved into new bodies if the old one decides that its taken enough punishment, essentially turning the entire planet into a respawning zone like those online first person shooter games. Kovacs is getting ready to question this latest career shift when one of his fellow soldiers tips him off to a discovery that some junior archeologists have made, a giant Martian portal that might lead to one of their ships. Although he feels some brief trepidation at the minor snags that come with this (i.e. the portal is in the middle of an active war zone and the main archeologist is stuck in a prison camp doing what people normally do in gritty futuristic prison camps, that is getting slowly traumatized into a complete lack of functionality) he does find that it certainly beats being used for target practice and signs on.

And from there we go. I found this one a slightly harder novel to get into than "Altered Carbon" only because with this scenario its not quite clear what the stakes are until fairly late in the game and everyone is pretty much along for the ride with Kovacs as they fling themselves from violent encounter to violent encounter, occasionally stopping for graphic sex (or at least thinking about it). With the first novel the hook of it (Kovacs is hired by a murdered person to prove he was actually murdered) was a bit more straightforward and hit me in the sweet spot, and the whole idea of solving a mystery in future San Francisco was a bit sexier. Here he's doing straight up military SF but unlike the more subversive examples of the genre (Heinlein's "Starship Trooper", Haldeman's "Forever War") he doesn't have much to say on the matter except that future war is just as crappy as current warfare, which means that a lot of the heavy lifting is being done by Kovacs' narration, which gives us just enough "I cynically hate all of you in a sensitive way" to at least keep it from shifting into a gung-ho chest-beating manly affair. Instead the ladies get into the act too and Morgan ensures there's more than enough violence to go around.

Its a bit of a weird novel in that sense, because you get the sense for a lot of it that its not quite sure what it wants to be as the team Kovacs assembles spends a good amount of time getting to the artifact and then figuring out how to activate said artifact, all the while dodging the various obstacles that tend to venture into their path. And while various mysteries do pop up from time to time, there's not as much of a feel for an overarching dilemma (other than staying alive, relevant in this case because their bodies are all being strafed by lethal amounts of radiation, so they're all dying slowly but have nice tans) to really hold all this together. So basically you're sticking around for the journey and to a lesser extent the destination, at least if you're curious what the Martian artifact is going to do and if Kovacs will be the only one left standing in the end.

All this makes for a more even read. Kovacs is as entertaining as ever, although at times it feels like Morgan dips a bit too often into the seemingly endless well of surprise Envoy powers, essentially turning Kovacs into a sociopathic Energizer Bunny. But he's got a way with dialogue that you don't see as often nowadays, with Kovacs spouting out many a line that you'd love to try out on your boss at work if it probably wouldn't result in getting fired and/or punched. He's that rare character who doesn't take too much crap from anyone but is still caught on the back foot often enough to give him a challenge, tough but not invincible and not the smartest person in the room but smart in the ways that count. Kovacs' struggle with being an actual human being at times and not as goal-focused give the novel more than a little humanity and make his interactions with the team more than ordering people around and feeling vaguely bad for them when they get killed.

And, this shouldn't be a surprise, but there's a metric ton of violence in this one as well. Not only are the war scenes decently graphic but you've got at least one fancy torture device that would make Franz Kafka go "Well, that's weird" and two fairly thorough massacres, at least one of which we get a front row seat for. Its not pretty by any means and at times makes the scenes near the artifact at least somewhat of a relief from the continuous stream of bullets to the head.

But you can't say Morgan doesn't have style and even if this one didn't grab me as much as "Altered Carbon" did its still an entertaining read even as it lurches toward the end (with the mystery pretty much solved after the fact) with everyone seemingly not quite sure what they've managed to accomplish. Its one of those books where the grey areas have grey areas and as such winds up being a bit harder to embrace. If Morgan's voice via Kovacs wasn't so strong it might have fallen into the mass of military SF and while it does lose some of its distinctiveness in the process it also proves that Morgan wasn't simply content to repeat himself.

This sequel to Altered Carbon is very different from that first book: the genre is more military sci-fi than neo-noir, it's set on a completely different planet, and the only returning character has been downloaded into a brand-new body. (I really wonder how / whether Netflix's adaptation of the series is going to handle all that.) But the technological underpinnings of cloning and uploading people remain, this time set around the archaeological dig of an alien artifact in the middle of a war.

Whether because I'm just not as into soldiers or because the novelty of the premise is wearing off, I didn't care for this story as much as its already-flawed predecessor. There are double-crosses that come out of nowhere, neat ideas about tech that aren't developed as fully as they deserve, and some really just plain bizarre psychosexual stuff. I'm still interested in the possibilities of this series, but the execution is leaving a lot to be desired.

Human beings are sick puppies. It's our genetic heritage. We are the only animal (at least on planet earth) that is fully self aware of our existence, pf the self-aware existence of others, and of our own mortality. If we thought about our mortality all the time, we would go mad and kill ourselves. Lots of us do go mad. Lots of us do kill ourselves. As the fine book, DENIAL points out, we are the only animals that broke the barrier of self awareness. Other primates did not. Elephants did not. Crows and ravens did not. Octopuses did not. I live in the woods with raccoons, very clever animals always trying to figure out how to turn off our electric fence so they can eat our chickens. Raccoons don't wake up in the morning and think, "I will be an ex-raccoon." Only humans do that. Why? Because we lie so much and so well. We invent an imaginary entity called 'god." We convince ourselves that we have an characteristic called a soul. In the face of the obvious fact that life is not fair, we invent a god who balances the books in imaginary places called heaven and hell. We preach about love and empathy while torturing and killing each other.

One of the more interesting and enjoyable types of lying is literature. Literature involves story telling around the camp fire, plays in an amphitheater, movies in a multiplex, and so on. Some literature is "non-fiction" such as the story of human evolution or the description of the Obama Administration's time in power. Some of it is fiction, ranging from Bible to the story of Troy to imaginations of the future.

We don't want to die. Suppose it was possible in the future to avoid death by transplanting brains, as we now transplant hearts and kidneys? With the possibility of death largely removed, as well as the capability of traveling from the "neighborhood" of our solar system to other stars, what would we be like? Would we live in joy and ecstasy, something like self-created gods (much as those crazy Mormons imagine that all humans become Gods if we believe their nonsense).

Morgan imagines and argues that we will simply remain the same sick top of the food chain puppies we always have been, killing and torturing each other as we have since time immemorial. I think he's correct, though I have my doubts we will survive this century, much less discover a way to "transfer our stacks" to "new sleeve," or travel any further than (perhaps) Mars. Just for entertainment value, he imagines an ancient race of avian Martians who have far surpassed us, left a few clues for us to scrabble after.

Perhaps that's all we can hope for. In our brief, vicious, stupid lives, a few moments of connection and entertainment. He entertained me. I'm a low-empathy sick puppy. If you are similar to me, you probably will enjoy his books. If not . . . I can't say those "bad words" on the store, so I leave them to your imagination.

So dissapointed that this book didn’t live up to the promise of the first. All the great noir events are gone. We get a blade runner meets alien novel that is muddy to follow. Clever misdirection is missing. Book had me counting down to the end. About that...the character keeps telling us how close to death he is. Die. Nope he goes on living and living. Stupid

Loyalty, loss, and betrayal are the themes that run like leitmotivs through Richard Morgan's second Takeshi Kovacs novel.

This time out, mercenary lieutenant Kovacs takes on a job that could get him out of the planetary civil war he's fighting and make him a rich man- and all he has to do is steal an alien battleship.

None of which is as simple as it sounds. There are both intra-company and governmental intrigues going on, not to mention that neither Kovacs' new colleagues nor his old can be trusted completely. And when the dead Martians who built the battleship millennia ago turn out maybe not to be quite so dead after all, all bets are off.

Revisiting Kovacs, Morgan fleshes him out as an outsider in a society where almost everyone has a desperate need to belong to something, whether it be a professional guild, an army, or a religion. In "Altered Carbon" we're given a glimpse of the degree to which being a UN Envoy- a trained-psychopath special forces soldier- limits or rules out joining any other club afterwards, but "Broken Angels" brings the message home clearly.

In both "Altered Carbon" and "Broken Angels" Richard Morgan has created a future that is bleak, but not without promise, and in Takeshi Kovacs he has created a character who is uniquely placed to show readers both the light and the dark sides of it.

After Altered Carbon I was looking forward to this book. It was completely disappointing. I felt like the first two thirds of the book are nothing but build up, to a third act of nothing much. I'm still looking forward to finishing the series with the next book, and hopefully it will be better.

Richard Morgan's fascinating "Broken Angels" once again concerns the exploits of his deadly futuristic anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs. Kovacs an erstwhile detective in previous Morgan novel, "Altered Carbon", finds himself in a familiar milieu. Kovacs, an ex- U.N. Envoy, a genetically enhanced super soldier, is an officer in a mercenary branch called Carrera's Wedge of the ruling government Protectorate army. A lethal, decimating planet-wide war is being fought on distant planet, Sanction 4 against revolutionary forces led by a Joshua Kemp. Kovacs' unit has been shot to pieces and he finds himself in an orbital hospital in the clouds above Sanction 4.

The battleground of the future is a far different place. Soldiers can be recyclable. Cortical stacks, metallic discs which contain the essence of an individual can be removed from the base of the skull and be re-inserted in various bodies called sleeves. Actual death only occurs upon the destruction of the cortical stack.

While Kovacs' wounds are being tended to he is seduced into a scheme by another wounded man in Wedge battledress. The man, Jan Schneider told a tale of a archeologically uncovered Martian spaceship in the Northern Rim area of Sanction 4, a site of intense warfare. The area contained a plethora of Martian relics from previous colonization. The starship contained a gate capable of transportation to other interstellar locations. The recovery of this starship could represent a major financial bonanza.

Kovacs' appetite sufficiently whetted, decides to go AWOL to seek this spaceship. He recruits the archeologist on the previous dig, Tanya Wardani and along with Schneider sells his scheme to greedy corporate financier Matthias Hand of the Mandrake corporation. They filter through a pile of cortical stacks to assemble a small force required to fulfill their quest. What follows is a dangerous pursuit during full scale warfare in an environment that is polluted with lethal radiation and booby trapped with nanotechnology.

Morgan paints a thought provoking panorama of future society with some interesting speculations about Martian culture. He concludes his riveting novel with welcome explanations for the motivations of the actions of his characters. He waxes philosophical and makes us realize that the more things apparently change, the more they remain the same.

Broken Angels is the second novel in the Takeshi Kovacs series, following Altered Carbon. In the previous volume, Kovacs had been needlecast to Earth, where he was impressed into investigating the temporary death of Laurens Bancroft, a Methuselah; that is, a rich, powerful and very old man. Larurens had apparently committed suicide just prior to the scheduled upload of his persona to backup. Kovacs waded through the sleazy environment in the back alleys of Bay City to learn the true circumstances of the death and even inflicted a little vengeance on a scum bag named Kawahara.
In this novel, Kovacs is a Lieutenant in Carrera's Wedge on Sanction IV. After a nasty firefight, he is evacuated to the hospital ship for treatment and recovery from wounds. There he meets Jan Schneider and learns of a Martian artifact that had been discovered just prior to Kemp's rebellion. Kovacs joins Schneider to free Tanya Wardani, an Archaeological Guild Master, from a government refugee camp. Wardani's find is a gate, a hyperspatial link to the outer Sanction system where a Martian dreadnought has been parked for millennia.
Kovacs, Schneider and Wardani gain the attention, and respect, of a corporate executive at Mandrake Corporation, one of the smaller, but growing, multisystem businesses. Hand agrees to pay them twenty million, plus needlecasts back to Latimer, for the discovery. With a group of veterans from the Soul Market, Kovacs and company camp out near the gate and Wardani starts to persuade the gate to open.
This story discloses much more about the Martians, an alien species named for the site of the original find, whose artifacts are spread across human space. In fact, Martian star maps guided the first human interstellar ships across the void to Earth compatible planets. Now humans have found a functional starship for the first time, a literally priceless discovery.
While the technology is very advanced, the cultures in this story have all the human flaws and foibles. Kemp is leading the rebellion of a society based on statist principals much like Marxist-Leninist communism. The Protectorate is an extension of the largest multisystem corporations, who are focused on the bottom line. Even with human persona downloads, and synthetic sleeves to house them, the death rate in the war between these two factions is enormous.
The story provides several examples of individuals with high certainty in the rightness of their efforts, all of whom use humans tools to obtain their goal. Moreover, these people are not reluctant to expend the souls and bodies of any number of persons in such pursuits. Sounds familiar, doesn't it!
This series demonstrates the excellence of the author as a writer, but the story itself is so intriguing that his writing skills are overwhelmed by the plot. Most of the concepts used in this series have been around for years; for example, Gallun's People Minus X included the download of human personas to synthetic bodies. However, the synergic effects of such ideas in this series actually produces a type of future shock.
Highly recommended for Morgan fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of tainted heroes dealing with human corruption and duplicity.
-Arthur W. Jordin

I give the author credit for writing a second novel with the same character using a completely different story type and themes. Too often authors end up writing the same story type or even the same story over and over again. Morgan stepped outside his comfort zone and in many ways he was sucessful. The story itself is engaging and surprising, the characters are enjoyable, the themes intersting.

However, I felt the thematic heart of Kovac's world; the examination of the impact, both personal and cultural, of the technology of the "stacks," was lost. It was turned into a mechansim to minimize the impact of death.

And dear Gawd can the main character stop describing everything, including every little feeling that runs through his body, at length? Description is good, but in this case, it stops the story for pages frequently, like two or three sometimes four times a chapter, and makes the book really drag. Morgan needs to be more selective on what he focuses on describing because I reached a point where I had to stop myself from skipping entire paragraphs, entire pages, trying to get back to the story because Kovacs was just going on and on. Also can can he stop referring back to his "Envoy neurochem," his "Envoy upgades," his "Envoy training," his "Envoy senses," his "Envoy intuition," every other page? Yes, we get it. He's an Envoy. Can we move on please?

The digitized world of Takeshi Kovacs continues in this very good second novel. Following Altered Carbon is not an easy task, but the author comes through nicely. Envoy trained and from a world surrounded by Martian death machines, Takeshi Kovacs is thrown into a search for a priceless Martian relic. Looking for mercenaries in a "stack" market where shovelfuls of minds are sold by the pail, and the grim business of nuking a city to cover a salvage job really push the boundaries of the Kovacs universe outward. I found a "darwinist" feel to the novel as multiple agencies fight for dominance during a bloody civil war. As a successor to Altered Carbon, Broken Angels twists how I feel about Takeshi, he is not simply a hard-boiled "detective" but a real product of his Quellist upbringing and Envoy military training. I greatly enjoyed the character development of this novel, especially the secondary characters that drive the plot. I can't wait for the next novel from this writer.

Morgan came out of nowhere in 2002 with _Altered Carbon_, the first novel about Takeshi Kovacs, overstressed, dangerously empathic diplomat/soldier trying to stay alive (more or less) four centuries into a future in which the mind lives in a bit of metal housed at the top of the spine and can be re-installed in any convenient "sleeve." This time out, a disgusted Kovacs is recruited by a deserter from the other side to set up an expedition to check out a major find left by the long-disappeared Martians -- who are the only reason humans are out in space to begin with. It's a quest tale, and a very good one, but the real pleasure, for me, is in the author's masterful portrayal and development of the characters. You don't necessarily have to like Kovacs, and you certainly wouldn't feel comfortable around him, but after two excellent novels, you would probably begin to understand him. There's some great quotable passages here, too, about the nature of war, and government, and loyalty, and the human situation in the universe. If _Broken Angels_ doesn't win the Hugo or the Nebula, or both, there is no justice. But, then, Kovacs knows that already.

Where to start... This is the second of the Kovacs' novels, and it's an unremitting slog. All the invention of Altered Carbon - the clever fusing of noir detection and cyberpunk - is reduced to a bleak technoscape and a fetish for inventive violence. The Martian plot is half-baked, and in any event takes pages and pages to develop. The rest is a carbon copy of the first, great book. Skip it.

I love both this book and Altered Carbon. They are two different books in how the action happens, and with the rather dynamic setting of sleeves, there is a ton that could be done to further explain the setting.

Richard Morgan's Broken Angels is a neat (sometimes very messy) adventure story set against a sweeping backdrop of dirty politics, revolutionaries, corporate loyalties, and military action, and on this foundation it begins to construct a Martian mythology.
This is the same world we were introduced to in Altered Carbon, further fleshed out and featuring the same but freshly sleeved hero, Takeshi Kovacs. Whereas Altered Carbon was a detective story driven by individuals, Broken Angels is a kind of treasure hunt, where personalities are secondary to the vast corporate and other forces that direct them. The noir is gone, but the darkness remains in this more traditional and militaristic sci-fi story.
The characters, though secondary, are fully three-dimensional with consistent behaviour. When bodies are so easily replaced, identity by personality is very important, and Morgan is a master at this. Takeshi Kovacs remains complex, a product of his slum-ridden childhood, his special-ops training, and bio-engineering, including a wolf gene splice.
The language and the violence are still pretty hard-boiled.
But. The punctuation. Was driving me. Nuts. Periods are intended to mark the end of a full sentence or, at the very least, a complete thought. Here, they are used to mark. Both unnatural. And natural pauses. Dashes and ellipses are better suited to this purpose - showing... how we... slow down to... collect our thoughts, or when our - speech - is - externally - interrupted. Fire that copyeditor.
The broken angels of the title are the vanished Martian civilization. I hope the archeologists of Richard Morgan's world will continue to pick away at their remains and piece together their culture in the promised third Kovacs novel, Woken Furies.
[...]

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan is, yet another, strange book! I listened to the un-abridged audio book. This is the third book by Morgan I have listened too.

Altered Carbon was the beginning of "this world". In Broken Angels, we continue with "the world" and the same main character. Morgan has defined a universe of planets with strange technologies. The key technology is that a person's whole "being" (person) is stored in a "stack" (think of it like a memory card). A stack can be moved from body to body which moves all of the person's memories and mental abilities. These bodies are simply called "sleves". So as a person's "stack" is moved from sleve to sleve so does their whole being. If a body dies, no problem, if someone will cause your "stack" to be "re-sleved" into a new body. This is just one example of this strange world Morgan has created.

I did really enjoy Broken Angels, however, I have previously completed Altered Carbon. I strongly recommend you read (or listen) to Altered Carbon first! Otherwise, you will lose alot of background and understanding of what's going on in Broken Angels. For example, do you know what an "On-Boy" is? Altered Carbon will explain.

BTW, Market Forces is also by Morgan is not related to either Altered Carbon nor Broken Angels, though set elsewhere in the same universe.

I do recommend all three books!

More complex, inventive,detailed and incomprehensible than anything I have ever read. The only impossibility is how does the hero look in a totally different body.
The concept of death being defeated and what that means about God is something I don’t think I can ever reconcile.
Try your luck.

Broken Angels is to "Soldier of Fortune" magazine what Altered Carbon was to the novels of Raymond Chandler. Our futuristic hard-guy, Takeshi Kovacs, having put his gumshoe career in San Francisco behind him, has been "re-sleeved" once again and is part of an elite corporate military strike-force fighting insurgents on a world called Sanction IV. But he has no qualms about going AWOL when offered a share of the profits in an archaelogical expediton on the same world. What's been found, it seems, is a "hyperlink" from Sanction IV to an actual Martian battlecruiser parked in space. Like the first Takeshi Kovacs novel, this tale has plenty of sex and violence; one scene of torture and execution is particularly brutal. But it's a page-turner with a satisfying ending, and good escapist science fiction.

Following up a novel as good as Altered Carbon must be tough, and Broken Angels is a worthy effort that avoids too much recycling of the original. Angels takes anti-hero Kovacs into space with a military slant and resembles a more traditional hard SF novel in many ways. The darkness and violence that splashes the pages of Carbon is writ large in this novel and it is definitely not for the squeamish reader. However, if you came to Angels expecting an escape from gentler fare, then it delivers in spades.

The wider cinematic stage of this book gives us a much broader view of the universe that Morgan has created and there are some striking scenes that stay around to haunt you. With the opportunity to find out more about Envoy Kovacs, this adds up to a very good sequel to an incredible novel.

BROKEN ANGELS (2003) is a story about a mercenary soldier who is involved in a planetary revolution on a fairly newly-colonized planet, who gets involved with a scheme to claim ownership of an advanced alien artifact with potentially huge military significance.

While the level of voilence in BROKEN ANGELS is similar to what I encountered in another of the author's stories (MARKET FORCES), I found that the voilence was more urbane to the story, and not just thrown in because it was "time for more voilence".

There are quite a few interesting and/or unique technologies presented in BROKEN ANGELS. Foremost is the ability for individuals to outlast their bodies ("sleeves"), and to live in virtual reality and/or be brought back to life in a cloned and quickly matured new body.

The story usually moves along at a good and exciting clip, but there are some chapters that disappoint. All in all, this 366 hardcover page book delivers "good value".

While Morgan's first book was dripping with a stylish noir flavor that gave his entire futuristic setting a unique hue, this second novel is much less inventive. In fact, his setting -- Sanction Four -- is a stock, two-dimensionally drab science fiction world with almost no real flavor or distinctiveness.

The fact that the entire planet is embroiled in a war, one that the protagonist Takeshi is involved in, does little to inspire the imagination. It's such an unpalatable background as to leave everything with this second novel hanging on the plot.

Unfortunately, there's no good news in that department.

The basic premise of the story leaves our once multi-dimensional angst riddled hero becoming nothing more than a galactic treasure hunter. Such a shift might be interesting, or even inspiring, if the "Martian treasure" Takeshi's crew are after, wound up yielding some shred of enlightenment about the long dead race that the premise revolves around. Or perhaps added a new wrinkle in our protagonist's agonizing history.

Yet neither was to be had here. Instead, we're left with an ending that looks ripe for a Hollywood blockbuster, with two old rivals squaring off to do each other end and grab the spoils.

Even though Morgan has a third Takeshi book out -- "Woken Furies" -- I have to say that I'm fairly hesitant to pick it up after this fairly drab sophomoric attempt.