Altered Carbon [season 1]

Following my reading of the rather thin (plot-wise) Thin Air, I took advantage of the virus to watch Netflix Altered Carbon. Which is based, roughly, on Richard Morgan’s book. While I enjoyed watching the efficient series, I failed to see a deeper message beyond the cyberpunk detective story, message that was indeed in the book. The show is very efficient with a well rendered futuristic San Francisco. Reminding me of Blade Runner, obviously. But also of the novels of William Gibson in many ways. Including this transformation of the Golden Gate Bridge into a container community. And the somewhat anachronistic fascination for samurais and yakuzas. A choice leading to repeated (wo)man to (wo)man fights that tend to become repetitive, a fairly high level of cruelty, sadism, gory and graphical episodes, definitely not a family show!, another futuristic and bleaker version of Chandler’s Farewell my Lovely, with the special twist of the murdered investigating his own murder already at the core of the book. But the lack of a deeper political message dilutes the appeal and somewhat the tension of the show, making somehow the existence of characters with a conscience hard to believe. A plus for the AI turned Edgar Poe turned The Raven hotel though! And a minus for the “happy ending.”..

And the cover is…just as ugly!

The cover for the final volume of Robert Jordan’s and Brandon Sanderson‘s the Wheel of Time,  A Memory of Light, has just appeared. Although the artist has changed, from Darrell K. Sweet who passed away before completing his cover to Michael Whelan, I find the cover as appalling as the previous thirteen covers in the series… With the same frozen features and caricaturesque characters, unrealistic depictions (look at the way Rand holds this sword!) and women at the back. I know, I know, I should not expect highly creative covers for fantasy books, but other recent books have managed much better, from Sanderson’s Mistborns (other series of Sanderson do not succeed so well, incl. Elantris) to Abercrombie’s trilogy (and his The Heroes), admittedly the coolest covers so far, to Morgan’s The Steel Remains, to Karen Miller’s series of The prodigal mage … Even the alternative e-book covers for  the Wheel of Time are quite acceptable, so I really wonder why the publisher sticks at those ugly and outdated covers.  Anyway, this is now a sort of tradition! The final volume is planned for early January 2013, which is in tune with what Brandon Sanderson told us last year when giving a public lecture in Paris. There is much expectation about this book, the culmination of a series I started reading more than 20 years ago!

The Cold Commands

“…my intention is that anyone reading The Cold Commands should feel a constant sense of relevance in the narrative, an eerie familiarity of issue and circumstance, a intense sense of now. And that does seem to be something that the fantasy genre as a whole works quite hard at shying away from.” R. Morgan, interview on Science Fiction & Fantasy, Cot. 20122

Over the trip to Banff last week, I managed to read Richard Morgan’s The cold commands, which is the sequel to The steel remains, that I read and reviewed a while ago. It has the drawback of a sequel in that most of the novelty wears off: most characters are the same as in the previous volume, while new characters tend to die quickly and rather unexpectedly, the battle scenes are not very different either, and the plot is a continuation of the previous story. This said, the book makes for a decent middle book in the series (“in that sense, Cold is probably the least standalone novel I’ve ever written“, R. Morgan) as better discussed in this review (spoilers included), and I am thus looking forward the third volume. (Abercrombie’s second volume Before they are hanged was more disappointing by comparison.)

The most complex and interesting character in this book is certainly Ringil faced with powers he does not truly understand and with loyalty to his friends that almost certainly leads him to his death, if in virtual spaces. It must be brought to Morgan’s credit (or was it unintentional?!) that he even demotes one of the three main heroes of The steel remains, Egar, to a lackluster situation requiring the others to rescue him from his own stupidity! I also feel that the third character, Archeth, was under-exploited and too prone to soul-searching. At least within this volume. The depiction of the rising religious fanaticism of the Citadel is a well-constructed (if uncomfortably close to real-world religions) aspect of the book, even though why this is essential for the alien dwendas to return in the world escaped me. Other than that, I found myself enjoying for the first time the mix of fantasy and SF therein, a mix that I usually dislike (even in the Wheel of TIme, this usually puts me off!). This must be due to Morgan’s excellence in writing SF… Thus, if you are ready to face more graphic sex and violence,  while hoping that the final volume will show the best of Richard Morgan’s skills, I would clearly advise reading this second volume!

black man [a.k.a. TH1RTE3N]

“Human intuition is deceptive because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect that underlying mathematics (…) When they clash, the mathematics remains correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.” Black Man, p.441

“thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years.” Black Man, p.102

This is the last book by Richard K. Morgan I read (after the Kovacs series, Market Forces, and The Steel Remains). It has also  been published under the title Thirteen (or Th1rte3n..) Black Man has some resonance with Broken Angels, with the central hero, Carl Marsalis, having some common points with Takeshi Kovacs. However, while the theme of a future hard-boiled hired detective in a bleak future is found in both novels, both Carl Marsalis and the tone of the novel are much more pessimistic than the Kovacs series, with no-one getting a clean and nice grade by the end of the book… The description of the future Earth is less technical than in the other novels, the focus being more on race, power, and politics. Carl Marsalis himself is facing a double stigma in this futuristic society, by being a black man and a genetically modified human, restored to the primal urges of 20,000 BC Homo Sapiens, a “thirteen”. Add to this being a traitor to his group by hunting runaway thirteens for a UN police force.

“Carl entered the equation with no local axe to grind, and nothing to loose…” Black Man,  p.305

The book starts like a space opera, but quickly gets grounded to the former U.S.A., split between a relatively tolerant Rim and backward Jesusland. The action immediately quicks in as well with many characters central to one chapter and dispatched in the next. Which made my reading the first hundred pages a bit hard. But after that the central characters were well-enough done to get familiar and the remainder of the story went by very very fast…

“After a while, when you’re on your own out there, you start making patterns that aren’t there. You start asking yourself, why you? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on your watch? You start to think there’s some kind of malignant force out there.” Black Man, p.328

Judging from some reviews found on the web, readers seem to prefer the Kovacs series. I am more ambivalent, in the sense that the pace and setup of the series is more grandiose and breath-taking. However, the less military/more political [in the wide sense] vision of the Black Man really got me in its grip and the ending(s) was (were) a superb piece of literature. The  announced departure of one of the major characters is very well rendered. Both novels are excellent books, that’s all! To wit, one got the Philip K. Dick Award, while the other got the Clarke Award. (Somehow inverted: Black Man would have been more fitting for the Philip K. Dick Award. If only because Marsalis’ hunt for fellow thirteens was reminded me of Deckhard’s parallel hunt in Blade Runner—a.k.a. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

The steel remains

“When a man you know to be sound of mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options.” R. Morgan, The steel remains

Over the trip to Edinburgh, I read the (first) fantasy book by Richard Morgan, The steel remains, and it reads awfully well! Given the other books of his I read so far, this is not very surprising. (A stylistic improvement over those is that marks are used as terminations of sentences, not as word separators as in so many sentences in the Kovacs series. Almost. Surely.) The plot summary looks like the standard one: retired hard-boiled mercenaries from a all-powerful empire get reunited to fight a terrible threat only them can vanquish. And they do. This sounds like the last fifty fantasy novels I mentioned, right?! Well, not exactly, because the above heroes are far from the down-the-shelf heroes (in the same way Abercrombie’s Heroes are anything but heroes…!) Actually, there is a lot in common between Morgan’s and Abercrombie’s types of fantasy, mostly that they both clearly escape almost all canons of the genre, towards the gritty, the gory, and the obscene. A wonderful mix. Which explains why Abercrombie wrote a rather enthusiastic review. With the surprising (given Abercrombie’s own prose!) reservation that “a few may reasonably think it could have been just a tad less lurid at times and gained punch as a result”!