Richard Morgan’s writing

I went through a phase reading Richard Morgan. It’s easy reading sci-fi and fantasy, that manages to not be too terrible, but is not amazing or groundbreaking.

Altered Carbon is the book that’s been made into a Netflix series. A former special agent awakes in a new body, one of many in a universe where consciousness can be downloaded and uploaded into new bodies. From there, it’s a noire feel – a grimy detective solving a grimy murder with double crossed deaths, and the rest.

A thing that detracted from this book, and the others, is a somewhat juvenile approach to sex. Morgan writes as though he were Fleming and Takeshi Kovaks his Bond, sleeping with multiple new conquests each book, tick-marks on a list he’s crossing off. It is … a downside to what is otherwise a reasonably well paced set of plot points.

To be honest, at points it all gets convoluted – but, fortunately, there’s just enough exposition to wrap things up and explain it all. You can read it easily, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t follow it too closely. Worth it for something light.

Quotes

What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only was to beat that was to go on stack [virtual upload] forever.

… they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.

Broken Furies is the second in the Altered Carbon series. This time, Kovaks wakes up searching for a Martian relic in the midst of a warzone. I liked how this one had a historical revolutionary in the background, set in the distant past, the Quellists, who inspires with her mythical exploits.

There’s alien spaceships to explore, strange technologies, betrayals by different sides, and again, a checklist of sexual experiences that Kovaks ticks his way through. That last detraction aside, it’s fun reading.

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

… all peace, has been paid for somewhere, at some time, by its opposite.

Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts.

Woken Furies is the final, and I think best of the Kovaks trilogy. Stumbling through his haphazard adventures, continually pursued by random miscreants, this time Kovaks stumbles across what may be the consciousness of a long-lost revolutionary leader / religious figurehead, Quellcrist Falconer. It links back to the complex Martian relics that orbit a particular world, destroying anything that flies above a certain heigh (or is that all they were doing? perhaps they were absorbing their consciousness as well).

This story goes a little beyond Kovak’s random adventures, and gives a sense of something slightly larger.

Quotes

‘This enemy you cannot kill,’ I murmured.

He nodded and finished the quote for me. ‘You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return’.

It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Maybe people would rather slobber over gossip and fleshshots of Josefina Hikari and Ryu Bartok than worry about who’s running the planet. Did you ever consider that? Maybe they’re happier that way.’ Scorn flickered on her face. ‘Yeah, maybe. Or just maybe that period you’re talking about was misrepresented. Maybe premillennial constitutional democracy wasn’t the failure the people who write the history books would like us to believe. Maybe, they just murdered it, took it away from us and lied to our children about it.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe they did. But if that’s the case, they’ve been remarkably good at pulling the same trick time and again since.’ ‘Of course they have.’ It was almost a shout. ‘Wouldn’t you be? If the retention of your privileges, your rank, your life of fucking leisure and status all depended on pulling that trick, wouldn’t you have it down? Wouldn’t you teach it to your children as soon as they could walk and talk?’ ‘But meanwhile the rest of us aren’t capable of teaching a functioning countertrick to our descendants? Come on! We’ve got to have the Unsettlement every couple of hundred years to remind us?’ She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the weed bale. She seemed to be talking to the sky. ‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe we do. It’s an uneven struggle. It’s always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.’

The Steel Remains is a fantasy novel that follows Ringil, a hero from a noble house, who now rots away in a remote village. I liked that Morgan had a gay central character – it’s a nice reversal of a set of traditional tropes. Because of it, Ringil stands against a society that mistreated him, an outsider who understands it like only someone who was born to power can.

He’s dragged out of obscurity when his mother hires him to rescue a cousin sold into slavery, only for him to stumble on a wraith-like creature from another realm. Together with old acquaintances, he and others must fight to defend the human realm against creatures gathering in the night, as former lovers become deadly foes.

It’s hard to connect with Ringil – he’s arrogant, often angry, and as one reviewer on goodreads noted, there isn’t much tenderness in the book – it’s pure conflict the whole way. That can drive narrative, but it can make it harder to connect with some of the characters. Still, a fun read if you’re after some good fantasy writing.

The Cold Commands is the second series in A land fit for heroes, Richard Morgan’s fantasy series. It follows more closely one of Ringil’s companions from the first book; but again, it pits a small group against the wraith-like creatures seeking to destroy humanity. It’s fun sci-fi, but it’s nothing incredible.

Market Forces is one of Morgan’s first books. It shows in the writing, which is rougher at points, but it has an interesting idea. It imagines a world where consultancies rule countries, replacing rulers at whim although they’re technically ‘hired’ by them, when in fact they compete with other consultants. Inside each company, as well, consultants battle each other, and across company lines, when they drive to the death to win contracts. It’s a weird little thought experiment, but one that makes for fun reading, and pulls out some of the absurdity of the corporate form. I also liked that it featured a protagonist who wasn’t seeking love, but instead was in the middle of a relationship that was falling apart (and that in fact he walks away from at the end of the novel) – it was a refreshing break from the usual romantic lines in a novel.

Another interesting thought experiment Morgan follows is of cities divided – between militarized, protected zones (liked walled compounds) where the wealthy and aspiring middle classes live, and those outside the walls, the once-working classes, who struggle and scrabble without the resources to survive as their society falls apart.

The protagonist struggles against those above him in the corporate hierarchy, and at times Morgan seems to suggest that he’ll throw them over over, for some kind of genuine change. In the end, though, he settles for simply ousting them, replacing their acolytes with his. It’s a disappointing ending, but perhaps one in line with Morgan’s view of humanity.

Quotes

Wearing a suit doesn’t make you smart, Chris. It just makes you greedy.

Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway.

I’d say a practising free-market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly.