Books by author: Richard K. Morgan

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon is deserving of the Philip K. Dick prize it was awarded. It deftly places a noir detective story in a sci-fi future where the futuristic technology always serves the plot. Here, the McGuffin is "cortical stack" technology, which allows a person's memories to be "resleeved" in a new body. This makes interplanetary travel more practical than sending meat across the cosmos, and it leads to major changes in society, many of which Morgan illustrates.

The novel serves several purposes equally well. It introduces a compelling protagonist and fleshes out a compelling universe, both of which will surely return in future novels. It provides a gripping mystery/suspense/thriller, with plenty of twists and lots of good action sequences, but also with good characterization and a strong sense of place.

I may be overselling here, but this is the first self-contained SF novel I've read in a long time that fulfills the promise of the genre.

Like many other readers who loved Altered Carbon, I think that Broken Angels is an inferior book. That's not to say that it's bad — I still enjoyed it quite a lot.

In Broken Angels, we again join Morgan's anti-hero, Takeshi Kovacs, in an action-packed thriller/mystery. Here, the McGuffin is a Martian portal that leads to a valuable miltary/scientific artifact.

Morgan is at his strongest when Kovacs is actively solving problems and driving the action. Things bog down during the middle third (or so) of the novel, when the characters are waiting for external events to move things forward.

Perhaps this is a slight sophomore slump for Morgan, but I'm certainly interested in reading his third novel when he writes it.

[Update: Martin helpfully points out that Morgan's new book Market Forces is already available in the U.K. Alas, it won't be published in the U.S. until March 1, so I don't feel too bad not knowing about it!]

Market Forces is a departure from the ultraviolent distant future of Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels (I highly recommend Altered Carbon, BTW). Here, Morgan takes a step back in time to the near future, and the violence — though still present — is more in keeping with present-day technology. In this future, the vision of Bush's neocons is extrapolated into a society where 90% of the population live in abject poverty and 10% maintain and expand their wealth by prompting and investing in third-world skirmishes.

It's a fast-paced ride, certainly worthwhile for fans of Morgan's other books.

The Steel Remains is a slight change of course for Morgan away from his usual hard-boiled science fiction. Here, he tries his hand at gritty swords-and-sorcery fantasy with flawed, perhaps controversial, characters. The main protagonist, Ringil, is a sword-wielding warrior who engages in gay sex with as much gusto as when he fights on the battlefield. The plot takes a very long time to get going, and this volume (of a proposed multi-volume cycle) ends abruptly. The other characters are somewhat less fully developed than Ringil, but they hold promise. There is reasonable closure here, with plenty of possibilities for the next entry.

Woken Furies is the first of Richard Morgan's novels since Altered Carbon that fully lives up to that debut. In it, Morgan further fleshes out his flawed protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, by delving into life on Kovacs's homeworld. It expands on the Quellist doctrine only hinted at in the previous books, and fully satisfies any Morgan fan's expectation of continuous action, violence, double-crosses, and plot twists. It's a terrific addition to Richard Morgan's rapidly expanding body of work.