All Things Chill

Richard K. Morgan, one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors, is releasing the third installment of the Takeshi Kovacs series titled Woken Furies next month. I’m excited! If you’re unfamiliar with the series, his first books Altered Carbon and Broken Angels have garnered positive reviews as well as the coveted Philip K. Dick award for 2003.

Here’s the Publishers Weekly review of Morgan’s first book, Altered Carbon:

This fast-paced, densely textured, impressive first novel is an intriguing hybrid of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Norman Spinrad’s Deus X. In the 25th century, it’s difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which-unless the stack is hopelessly damaged-their consciousness can be downloaded (”resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body. While the Vatican is trying to make resleeving (at least of Catholics) illegal, centuries-old aristocrat Laurens Bancroft brings Takeshi Kovacs (an Envoy, a specially trained soldier used to being resleeved and trained to soak up clues from new environments) to Earth, where Kovacs is resleeved into a cop’s body to investigate Bancroft’s first mysterious, stack-damaging death. To solve the case, Kovacs must destroy his former Envoy enemies; outwit Bancroft’s seductive, wily wife; dabble in United Nations politics; trust an AI that projects itself in the form of Jimi Hendrix; and deal with his growing physical and emotional attachment to Kristin Ortega, the police lieutenant who used to love the body he’s been given. Kovacs rockets from the seediest hellholes on Earth, through virtual reality torture, into several gory firefights, and on to some exotic sexual escapades. Morgan’s 25th-century Earth is convincing, while the questions he poses about how much Self is tied to body chemistry and how the rich believe themselves above the law are especially timely.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A full list of editorial reviews can be found here.

I love the series. Its geeky, dark and sexy as hell. If you’re a techie, like film noir and love the FIRST Matrix, Takeshi Kovacs will have you @ HELLO ‘Gimmie a cigarette dammit’.

I can recall Warner Bros. buying the movie rights for Altered Carbon a couple years back… and with the wonderful artistic risks that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller took with Sin City, I’m sure there’s some producer/director/actor itching to get this ‘future noir’ series in theatres.

You heard it here first!

~Spec

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2005 at 8:01 am and is filed under Books, Comics & Graphic Novels, Flicks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.