K-SCORE: 51
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Spoiler Level: Minor
“He interrupts himself, he half-describes things and then inserts an expletive, he ends chapters right when you are at your most confused, he tries to use language to create a sense of pain or of disorder or nonrealities onset from drugs, computer programs, or alien technology. And if you compiled his descriptions and sorted through that language you’d find that everything is extreme.”
Broken Angels is a disappointment. It’s not a bad sci-fi novel, but it’s the sequel to Altered Carbon, which has a really promising premise ripe for further exploration, and yet chooses not to explore most of the areas previously introduced. Instead of following a Takeshi Kovacs who has fallen further into the isolated galactic underworld or who has an even higher stakes detective mystery to unfold, we get a Takeshi who has regressed to his soldiering days and seems almost bored with the conflicts at play. We get a story set on a war-ravaged planet, where both the planet and the war are inconsequential backdrops to the rest of the narrative. Instead of diving deeper into the cyber realities mentioned in the first or attacking the concept of resleeving (downloading your brain into a new body) the characters almost all stay who they are, in the same body, the same place, the whole way through. Little to no new insight is gained on the most central idea in Richard K. Morgan’s series. Worse, the whole ensemble is slowly dying of radiation poisoning throughout so their resleeving seems like it should be an inevitable moment to look forward to and it just doesn’t come. Characters that die, really die, for increasingly convoluted reasons, and all the while you’re left to wonder why Morgan spent so much work on these ideas just to mostly abandon them.
“Morgans’s ideal person is just a cynical killer I guess”
His focus was off, and he didn’t understand what he was good at before. Morgan creates a new stage for conflicts and a new cast of dark heroes, self-righteous villains, sleazy turncoats, and sexy sidekicks, but none of them are impressive. After reading the whole novel, I feel I know next to nothing about Sanction IV apart from its political disputes, which don’t even come to a resolution. And as for the characters, at least seven of them I’d say are defined first as bitter people and second as violent badasses. Morgans’s ideal person is just a cynical killer I guess, with no-belief-system Takeshi ruling the roost. Ole Hansen, Vongsavath, Jian Jianping, Sutjiadi, Luc Duprez, and Schneider were all similar in personality. A few of the other like Sun Liping and Lieutenant Loemanko were not given enough content to become fully realized characters. I felt like I got to know Cruickshank, Tanya Wardani, and Matthias Hand well enough, but that didn’t make them good characters necessarily. Wardani is annoying throughout, incredibly hypocritical, and yet is the only one to show outward emotion, most outbursts of which get completely ignored. Hand doesn’t develop. Cruickshank is used for motivation and nothing more. And all the while Takeshi is there, assuming his Envoy-instincts will solve everything, not really caring what he has to go through or who he has to kill to get to his next point. Everything is leading up to leaving the planet he doesn’t like with the war he doesn’t care about, and I never understood why or how he got involved in it all in the first place.
Instead of delving deeper, Morgan steps to the side. Broken Angels explores the premise of the Martian benefactor race, when that was really only alluded to in Altered Carbon. I don’t hate it, the Martian runes, the warship, the theories, but it’s not as interesting as resleeving or virtualities, and it doesn’t go very far because it can’t. Morgan is dealing with a personal detective story on some level still, and so he can’t go about having Takeshi lead the first-contact crew with aliens. That’s galaxy-rending, humanity-changing conflicts and a different sci-fi subgenre. So he settles for a Martian ghost ship, which serves as a backdrop for human battles and a few unexplained phenomena. It’s unsatisfying most of the time, even if he did get my fingers tingling a little with what he described beyond that gate.
“The story rounds out for the most part, even if there is little in the way of character development. Plot development is a decent substitute.”
The story rounds out for the most part, even if there is little in the way of character development. Plot development is a decent substitute. The problem Morgan has isn’t that he can’t write these webs of mystery, it’s that he can’t get the reader to care about the web as the connections are realized. Too many of his characters are disimpassioned killers for you to be worried about them, and too much of the tech is newly inserted or poorly understood for you to really grasp what the worry would be even if you had it. Oh no, he got to the polalloy station before Takeshi spotted him?... Not an electromag-accelerated grenade employed by Carrera the VacCom expert?... Those nanobes really seem like a problem except that Takeshi can just shoot them?... I’m just barely coming to understand some of the most basic combat tech and vehicles in Morgan’s universe and he’s still layering on top new ones. There aren’t the necessary descriptive paragraphs for/uses of these technologies for you to appreciate their coolness or characters’ mastery of them. This is a real problem given how much of the novel is combat engagement.
The biggest irritation has little to do with any of that though. The most major issue, the thing that should have been stripped from the novel in editing, is the terribly numerous sections of the story where Richard K. Morgan takes creative liberties with the prose. He interrupts himself, he half-describes things and then inserts an expletive, he ends chapters right when you are at your most confused, he tries to use language to create a sense of pain or of disorder or nonrealities onset from drugs, computer programs, or alien technology. And if you compiled his descriptions and sorted through that language you’d find that everything is extreme. This woman is the best pilot, the best ninja insurgent, the most competent systems engineer, the most deadly man on Sanction IV with a Sunjet. This weapon is invincible, auto-programmed, causing instant painful death and dismemberment at any distance; it evolves, it alters the fabric of space and time as it turns its victims into a paste of blood and bones. It’s relative power that causes cool moments though. When Dumbledore battles Voldemort in HP 5, it’s really cool because you know what most wizards can do and you read about Harry and Ron struggle to levitate a feather. In Broken Angels, everyone is amazing at everything and Takeshi is better, and you never have a grounding of what’s possible and what’s not.
In the epilogue, Takeshi is loaded into a virtual program to live an easy existence on a long spaceship ride to a more central planet with the few buddies of his that survived. Even though there isn’t really a conflict remaining at that point, I found myself more interested in what was happening then than at any other point in the story (save perhaps for the cortical stack mine, which was quite interesting), which at once shows promise for Woken Furies, and demonstrates how disappointing Broken Angels is. Time dilation, relative lifetimes, virtual realities, the promise of new bodies, space, spaceships, and characters that actually survive to see another story are all interesting to me. Morgan just needs to get better at taking you through his dreamy dark future by staying grounded in his core concepts.