Once again, Chip is making a recommendation based on four books, two of which she hasn’t technically read yet. This is how Chip rolls, and if you don’t like it she invites you to get your own damn blog.<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
Richard Morgan–whom Shadow and I met at WorldCon, and who looks like a less-lived-in Fred Ward–sold his debut novel on his first try, it was a bestseller, and its movie rights were optioned for $1 million. That, right there, should be enough to make you want to punch him in the nose. Unfortunately, that might discourage him from writing more books, and that would be a shame.<\/p>\n
Morgan has published four books, three of which–Altered Carbon<\/I> (his debut novel), Broken Angels<\/I>, and Woken Furies<\/I>–are set in the same milieu. The other one, Market Forces<\/I>, is a big ol’ hint that he’s got some anti-globalism leanings, based as it is around the idea of taking “corporate ninja” literally.<\/p>\n
The Altered Carbon<\/I> series is based on two main premises: 1) All humans are fitted with “stacks”–little widgets that sit at the top of your spine and keep a constant backup of your entire personality. Trading bodies is as easy as swapping your stack into a new “sleeve.” 2) There are relics of a very advanced, long-vanished race (commonly called “Martians,” because some of their artifacts were found on Mars) on some worlds that humans have colonized.<\/p>\n
The protagonist is Takeshi Kovacs, a retired ultra-elite soldier. In Altered Carbon<\/I> Kovacs is working as a private investigator. He’s hired by a very rich client to find out why he (the client) committed suicide. The rich can afford to have their stacks backed up remotely on a periodic basis, and after the client blew his head off (and obliterated his stack) his backup was re-sleeved into a cloned body. The story is a wonderful exploration into what “stack technology” would actually mean for humans. If you lose your original body, you might (if you’re poor) use a cheap synthetic substitute or simply exist in a mainframe. There are “designer bodies” for the rich. Catholics (which by now are just a weird remnant sect) refuse to be re-sleeved once they’ve died since they believe they’re going to heaven. It’s a very, very cool idea, and the changes wrought upon human society and human thought processes seem realistic and well-rendered.<\/p>\n
Although the Martians are mentioned in Carbon<\/I>, Broken Angels<\/I> explores them in some depth. This time Kovacs is a soldier-for-hire, and the war is not going well. A big chunk of the book centers around the discovery of an ancient Martian spaceship in orbit around the planet he’s on, and a portal on the surface that opens right next to the ship. It also hints at something that seems to be overlooked in a lot of SF involving highly-advanced alien relics: Just because one advanced race has vanished, it doesn’t mean there aren’t other, similarly-sophisticated races out there…and they could squish humanity like a bug. Morgan portrays the humans learning to use these artifacts sort of like children playing at being adults; they don’t really understand how or why the things work, and they may not even be able to. (That’s another thing I liked–it’s made very clear that the Martian brains were so different than human brains that no human can really grasp the Martian thought process.)<\/p>\n
There are all kinds of neat throwaway details in the books that hint at a rich milieu behind the scenes: The bodies that Kovacs and his team of soldiers are using at the beginning of Angels<\/I> contain some wolf DNA, giving them a strong sense of pack loyalty. “Deceased” family members–those who can’t afford another sleeve–can be “spun up” into a rental sleeve for important family events such as weddings. And AIs have the ability to buy out their contracts and work independently (such as The Hendrix, an automated AI hotel with the personality of Jimi Hendrix).<\/p>\n
We signed up for Morgan’s author kaffeeklatsch at WorldCon. (It was Shadow, me, and 8 Brits who assumed we were also British because we didn’t speak. Know what? The British don’t like Americans.) He told us that he had been given an advance to write some ungodly number of “dark fantasy” novels, so I’m not sure when he’ll get back to science fiction. I’ll check out his fantasy stuff–unlike Shadow, I don’t burst into flame upon contact with fantasy novels–but I’ll definitely be looking forward to more SF.<\/p>\n
Related: Once again, Chip is making a recommendation based on four books, two of which she hasn’t technically read yet. This is how Chip rolls, and if you don’t like it she invites you to get your own damn blog. Anyway. Richard Morgan–whom Shadow and I met at WorldCon, and who looks like a less-lived-in Fred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nRobert A. Heinlein<\/A>
\nDan Simmons<\/A>
\nTim Powers<\/A>
\nNeal Stephenson<\/A>
\nRoger Zelazny<\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"