Düşmüş Melekler (2003 original; edició 2018)

I like the world he's built for Kovacs, and how it's a essentially a spy thriller in space with ancient aliens. Cool book, and a pretty good sequel. ( )

This review is also on Woken Furies (#2 and #3 in the Altered Carbon series)

First I read Altered Carbon and was so touched by it that I then read the other two in the series: Broken Angels and Woken Furies.

So during the day I am tooling around the Baltic: Russia, Finland, Sweden, then Germany. I am soaking up all this stuff from the past, most of it brilliant. By night, however, I am soaking up all this stuff from the future, all of it brilliant.

The main protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, like all good mass murdering heroes, has some moral dilemmas about what he does for a living. The good thing about sci-fi is that it doesn’t get its head stuck up its arse Moral dilemmas are dealt with in a very pragmatic fashion that usually involves someone dying, sometimes the wrong person.

This is not the thinking person’s sci-fi, it is more the feeling person’s sci-fi. I am assuming in writing this that you also like sci-fi and have the same snobbish pretensions that I do.

One real stand out thing about this series is that it is racially blurring. Is Takeshi Kovacs black? or sometimes black? and sometimes Asian? or sometimes something else entirely? I ask that because it is not often in any book that the main protagonist is so very undefined that you cannot hang any racial stereotypes on his frame, benevolent or not. It remind me of something that I came across recently that said, “The body is only a garment, address the wearer not the cloak.” To all practical purposes it places the focus more directly on the character themselves and takes away any visualising you may (unconsciously) do to flesh them out. As a device I really liked it. Having said that, all the arseholes were quite clearly defined.

I cannot think of another genre that has to ride so much stigma from so-called “book people” than sci-fi. I recently read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, it is brilliant. I also read The Martian by Andy Weir it too, is brilliant.

Both are fiction, but one requires reading things like The Guardian or The New York Times and the other takes imagination. No Bookers for guessing which is which.

As an aside, a few years back I set myself the task of reading all the Booker winners. Man, apart from a few gems, most of them are like looking at your grandparents underwear. ( )

This was actually quite good - definitely more hard/"straight" sci-fi than Altered Carbon, but with much of the same joy of discovery. Morgan has rather a knack for all this worldbuilding stuff. In this, we get the Martian progenitors fleshed out a bit more, though still with ample mystery. Much of the book reads like Starship Troopers meets Aliens by way of Stargate with light hints of Lovecraftian atmosphere. Definitely a fun read; looking forward to the next. ( )

I truly didn't have a clue what I was getting into when I started this second book in the Kovacs trilogy. Altered Carbon was a VERY different beast.

That being said, we pick up with Kovacs thirty years after his reawakening on Earth and he's far down his lonesome path, giving up on private eye stuff and giving up his free will to join a war. An ongoing war that's either economics or ongoing economics by other means, that is. Give him something bloody to bite into and he's happy enough. It certainly doesn't hurt that his particular Envoy training gets him all the best gigs and privileges.

But is this a hard-bitten war novel? It certainly seems to be, with the wrinkle of easy sleeving into new flesh and the bitter by-line of corporations versus colonial governments.

But. Add an ancient civilization, the one that we stole the tech that turned us all into immortals, a fantastic find, and then turn it into an exploratory heist novel with enormous opportunities for cross and double-cross, and we've suddenly gone into great hardcore SF territory.

Kovacs is still fantastic and Morgan has a talent turning out complicated and memorable characters up and down the line. I felt sad for each death. And what beautiful deaths they were. This was some harsh territory filled with great mysteries. Kovac's intuition still runs as hot as his hallucinatory madness.

Few hard-SF novels are quite as memorable as this one, but that's more a feature of the characters than anything else. I've read some really amazing epics. Even so, this one is deeply satisfying and a winner on nearly all levels.

It IS NOT anything like a repeat of the first. Get that expectation out of the way and I'm sure everyone's enjoyment will be very high. :) ( )

Ce deuxième roman de Richard Morgan est également le deuxième de la trilogie qu'il a consacré à Takeshi Kovacs, son héros vivant aux vingt-cinquième et vingt-sixième siècles. Si le premier roman, Carbone modifié, s'apparentait à un polar futuriste, celui-ci tient plus du récit de guerre et du roman d'aventure. On retrouve avec plaisir le principe des enveloppes corporelles, utilisées ici essentiellement pour le combat. C'est d'ailleurs la guerre et tous ses travers qui sont au centre des questionnements de l'auteur dans Anges déchus. Mais cela a déjà été abordé par de nombreux auteurs, à l'inverse de la vie éternelle et de ses dérives qui avaient traités dans Carbone modifié. La puissance créatrice de l'auteur, dévoilée dans Carbone modifié, s'exprime moins dans Anges déchus. On est donc en présence, comme souvent pour les deuxièmes romans de trilogies, d'un ouvrage de transition, plus faible que le premier. Espérons que, comme souvent là-aussi, le troisième soit du même niveau que le premier. ( )