Richard K. Morgan

Returning to Harlan's World to achieve retribution for a lost love, Takeshi Kovacs becomes caught up in political intrigue when he comes to the aid of a woman being hunted by a savage young Envoy who claims that he is Kovacs himself.

Woken Furies

High Fidelity

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves

“No, I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing.”

“We must be prepared to live on time scales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realize our own dreams.”

-“That why you won’t do the clone thing, huh? Wear every sleeve for what it’s worth?”

-“Learn every sleeve for what it’s worth,” he corrected me gently.

“But you’re not planning to stop with them?” I shook my head. “I’m not planning to stop at all, Virginia. They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?”

Suddenly I needed to know. “Do you think this is a ghost we’re

He made a tiny sound, something between a chuckle and a sigh.

“We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we now do, how could we not be.”

“Rage at injustice is a forest fire—it jumps all divides, even those between generations.”

“Don’t fucking stand here bitching to me about it, let’s see you do better.”

Gavin

Read immediately after the 2nd book. This one errs on the splattery side: cybersplatterpunk. Nasty, entertaining look at revolution and market forces. Quotable too: On oppression: “This enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged into the depths, and teach your children to watch the waves for its return”; on political pieties: “it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with”. 

Morgan still manages to surprise – e.g. the fully sadistic massacre of misogynist priests is hard to forget. The sea planet itself is the best of the new characters, weird and postmodern in layout, mechanics, oligarchy, mores. 

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How does it do as Serious science fiction?

 Social development: The last of the Kovacs novels – I’ll miss the nasty universe, with its fully fleshed-out cybersociety – its religions still boycotting technologies, its new dilemmas (which clone should I repay if their interests conflict?) and crime; its remarriage customs when one spouse gets a new body… It holds up. 

 Software development: No.

 Actual Science: Eh.

Richard Morgan

This is high action, ideas driven noir SF of the highest order. Morgan has already established himself as an SF author of global significance. Takeshi Kovacs has come home. Home to Harlan's World. An ocean planet with only 5% of its landmass poking above the dangerous and unpredictable seas. Try and get above the weather in anything more sophisticated than a helicopter and the Martian orbital platforms will burn you out of the sky. And death doesn't just wait for you in the seas and the skies. On land, from the tropical beaches and swamps of Kossuth to the icy, machine-infested wastes of New Hokkaido the hard won gains of the Quellist revolution have been lost. The First Families, the corporations and the Yakuza have a stranglehold on everything. Embarked on a journey of implacable retribution for a lost love, Kovacs is blown off course and into a maelstrom of political intrigue and technological mystery as the ghosts of Harlan's World and his own violent past rise to claim their due. Quellcrist Falconer is back from the dead, they say, and hunting her down for the First Families is a savage young Envoy called Kovacs who's been in storage ...