A few years ago I wrote a review of "Altered Carbon", by Richard K. Morgan. While heartily recommending the work, I raised a number of "quibbles", one of which I guessed might be a hook for a subsequent novel. Having now read the sequel, "Broken Angels", it is only fair an reasonable that I review it and my quibbles.
The central precept of this future history is the technology to digitally record a mind in an implanted "cortical stack", which can be "re-sleeved" into *any* body. As I remarked before, this raises compelling questions of identity, responsibility and mortality, which the author addresses in interesting ways.
Our hero finds himself on the corporate-sponsored government side of a civil war, on a minor colony planet far from Earth, when he is recruited to retrieve a priceless "Martian" artifact from the war zone. We learn that the Martians are a long-vanished hyper-technological civilization, whose artifacts were first discovered on Mars (hence our term for them). It is from study of these artifacts that Man has gleaned some of his most advanced technology, such as super-luminal communication, and the location of habitable planets. In fact an entire economy, perhaps even *the* entire economy, revolves around exo-archeology. This background goes a long way toward addressing many of the questions that lingered from the first book.
In an adventure yarn reminiscent of Alistair McClean, our hero assembles a band of mercenaries and one archeologue, and embarks on the mission, beset on all sides by double-dealing and deception, and by the suspicion of betrayal from within. This reads like a screenplay; indeed one can image an entire movie franchise based on this trilogy (the thrst volume is "Woken Furies"). The hurtling action, replete with graphic carnage (and sex), is illuminated by musing on politics and war, often in the form of quotes from Quellcrist Falconer, a sort of cross between Mao Tse Tung and Kilgore Trout.
Morgan has a number of clever neologisms, like "illuminum" and "communitarianism", and insightful speculation on the effects of wire-heading and combat stimulants. But there are also a few troubling anachronisms, like barcodes and cigarettes. I speculated before that Morgan suffers from this particular form of nicotine addiction. In the context of the historically shifting fashions in drug delivery (pipe-smoking, snuff-snorting, chewing), cigarette smoking appears as quaint as the land-line telephone.
One unexplored consequence of mind recording technology is the possibility of endless duplication. There is a hint that this is somehow regulated: sleeving a back-up copy requires "authorization". But it is clear that given unregulated technology, mind-clones are likely to be as abundant as pirated software is today. Any regulatory regime, on the other hand, is likely to be as authoritarian as China. Perhaps the author explores this theme in other works. I intend to read them, and see.
Richard K Morgan Broken Angels; Gollancz. 490 pages ISBN 0-575-07550-3 paperback C$10.99
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