he world depicted in Richard Morgan's first novel, Altered Carbon (2002), was an info-dense, steroidal future. Merciless corporations ruled the economic and cultural landscape while a U.N. protectorate enforced a stern discipline across a small interstellar polity. A spinal "stack" inserted in each individual maintained a realtime backup of that person's self—a digital soul in a chip, if you will—ensuring that bodily death was merely an inconvenience—assuming one had the money and pull to get "resleeved" in a clone of one's choosing. Our narrator-protagonist in this rough-and-tumble scenario was Takeshi Kovacs, an Envoy or high-level enforcer for the Protectorate. Caught up in some ultra-tangled machinations on Earth, Kovacs eventually found himself going through a crisis of faith.
Fast-forward 30 years—not all of them actually inhabited in real-time by Kovacs—and we find our hero serving as a mercenary in a war on the colony Sanction IV, with a group called Carerra's Wedge. Recently killed and resurrected, Kovacs is desultorily enjoying some R&R when he is approached by a fellow soldier named Jan Schneider. Schneider wants Kovacs' help on the deal of the century. A Martian derelict ship has been found, its existence kept a secret so far. (The "Martians" are a forerunner race that did not actually originate on that planet, but whose ruins were first found there.) The location of the ship can now be sold to one of the corporations for a vast fortune. But the men will need to free an archaeologist named Tanya Wardani from a POW camp first.
Kovacs buys in, and soon he and Schneider have rescued Wardani. They next approach the Mandrake Corporation as a likely client, and find themselves dealing with an executive named Matthias Hand. Hand comes onboard the project, helping to assemble a team of crack mercenaries to aid Kovacs. Returning to the dig where Wardani first discovered the Martian jumpgate that leads to the orbiting derelict, the crew is at the point of passing through the gate when disaster strikes. Scrambling through to the far side after taking casualties, Kovacs and company find that their troubles are just beginning. For the Martian ship is not as dead as it appeared; Kovacs' old boss, Carrera, is on their trail as well, and if your stack gets fried, even an immortal soldier can die for good.
A space opera with a noir flavor
Morgan's first book—enough of a smash to be immediately optioned for Hollywood treatment—was a black-hearted extravaganza that ramped up and extended the archetypical noir stylings and tropes created by Hammett, Chandler, et al., which have proven so congenial to SF in general and to the cyberpunk movement in particular. This latest book maintains some of that ambiance—the level of double-dealing and treachery alone would insure that—but layers in a wartime affect that makes the result read like William Gibson's version of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1975). Factor in the space-operatic elements of vanished elder races and jumpgates—admittedly reminiscent more of William Barton and Alastair Reynolds than of Andre Norton—and you've got a novel that, while still vastly engaging, is more diffuse than its predecessor.
This is not to say that Morgan sprawls all over the place. In fact, the plot is straightforward and propulsive, never lagging in either action or ideation. There's lots of nifty technology deployed, for one thing, in crisp, clear detail. Although it's all very understandable tech, things like bigger guns and tinier spy cameras and tougher battlesuits. Nothing like the really weird inventions of a posthuman future such as those seen in, say, the novels of John C. Wright. Some of this relative technological backwardness is explained away as deliberate rein-tugging by the Protectorate, but really Morgan is relying on this familiarity of tools to make his noir conceits plausible. Still, a scene such as that at the "Soul Market," where bloody stacks straight from the battlefield are sorted in a kind of infernal atmosphere, attain undeniably exotic impact. One might at times imagine that if Leigh Brackett were a young SF writer today creating new planetary-romance environments for her hero Eric John Stark to navigate, she'd be turning out prose much like this.
The new characters Morgan introduces are all colorful and vivid enough to complement Kovacs' monstrous damaged-survivor personality. Morgan makes sure to individuate all the platoon members of the mission, and their intermittent deaths resonate. Sometimes Morgan's stylistic tricks fall a little flat. In Chapter 28, a string of one-word paragraphs does not really heighten the battle scene. Nor should we be impressed. By dialogue that uses full stops. To emphasize. Toughness.
But in the end, Morgan's blend of gory warfare, sense of wonder and quest for personal salvation packs enough of a kick to make you glad you went along for the savage ride.
