<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/morgan.jpg" align=left The latest entry in an occasional series on speculative fiction – Distant Suns.
A little while ago, I was having a friendly disagreement on Facebook about the merits of Bruce Sterling‘s science fiction, touching on his expertise or otherwise in wordbuilding. Although I’m not absolutely in sympathy with his politics, I was arguing that Sterling did create some plausible futures which threw some light on sundry controversies of the present – particularly around ecological issues and transhumanism. At one point we touched on that thorny perennial – the intention of the author, which I’m not much interested in as a hermeneutic.
But, to cut a long story short, I was advised to read some Richard K. Morgan. That despite the acknowledgement that Morgan makes to John Pilger and Noam Chomsky for opening his eyes to the history of the present, as it were, which my friend knew was going to be a red rag to a bull!
Anyway, I popped into Pulp Fiction and picked up Morgan’s second novel – Broken Angels. His first, Altered Carbon, would have been the obvious place to start – since it inaugurates the Takeshi Kovacs series – but I thought it was a tad unfair to try out an author based on their initial publishing effort.
A few centuries hence, humanity has spread out across the stars, following trails signalled by the remains of the ‘Martian’ civilisation, whose artefacts and culture are only imperfectly understood by ‘archeologues’. The key technological innovation in Morgan’s universe is the practice of ‘resleeving’ – the retrieval and implantation of consciousness in a new body. True to his political commitments, Morgan makes it clear that access to a new sleeve is most unequal and the technology is closely held by corporations and the mercenary armies they employ – whose machinations are only lightly disguised and legitimised by the veneer of government. Kovacs, a former UN Envoy (still bearing the conditioning proper to such a role), is now a mercenary officer in Carrera’s Wedge, an outfit fighting a rather unsavoury war against a rebel force, whose politics are hardly more enlightened than the Cartel running the Protectorate.
Kovacs, recovering from a nasty firefight, is approached by a somewhat dodgy pilot to liberate dissident archeologue Tanya Wardani from a prison camp, and to parlay her find of a Martian interstellar gateway into riches for the Mandrake corporation and its sinister exec Matthias Hand. They put together a band of resleeved special ops fighters, and the action begins.
Broken Angels is a good read – fast paced on the whole, focused in its plotting, staying one step ahead of the reader in revealing the twists and turns of the narrative, and featuring engaging characters.
My reservations, though, go to the politics of the novel. It seems to me to be somewhat trite to reveal that glory and honour aren’t the hallmarks of war, and that politicians and their corporate paymasters have their own agendas. Perhaps this message – which I’d have thought was conveyed long ago by some of the originals of the space opera subgenre – even Heinlein – is supposed to be reinforced by the intensity of the depiction of violence in Broken Angels. It does carry some more weight (and certainly more than the appallingly written sex scenes) than it might have because the tale has a human dimension above and beyond the theatrics of the plot. But I’m really not sure that “war is evil” is the subversive, parodic theme that Morgan avers it to be.
More telling is the emptiness at the heart of the book’s construction – Kovacs, who narrates the story in first person, is something of a burnt out shell. The characteristics of the hard boiled detective which enveloped him in Altered Carbon remain – it’s precisely the goal of survival at all costs which really is called into question by his emotional evisceration. I’m not the first to observe that the supporting cast are more human and much more alive than the ostensible (anti?) hero – even Hand the corporate Machiavelli. The possible exception is Wardani – whose dehumanisation in the prison complex is no doubt to blame. But Kovacs’ crew are much more sympathetic than any of the main protagonists and live far more off the page – we really care when Cruikshank is irredeemably killed. By contrast, I found it hard to take much of an interest in Kovacs’ fate.
I suspect this is an intentional schema for Broken Angels’ characterisation, and I think it packs more of an emotional and political punch than the observations about inequality, poverty and the military as an opportunity for social advancement that are ostensibly the carriers of the book’s political message. Whether or not Morgan conceived of it this way, showing the personalities shaped – and reshaped through sleeving – by a fundamentally unjust and violent social order has more force than the description or imagining of that dystopic world itself.
I’m left wondering if that’s something that might apply to all dystopic fiction?
I’d just like to point out that Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix space opera continuum is the only one in recorded history to really work in status through clothing and clique coolness as a means for taking and leading debate over controlling evolving economies beyond earth.
How else do you explain Bono Vox?
And let’s face it. Iain M. Banks has pretty sunk the space opera genre (or at least pretty much quarantined within his purview) by adding the two ultimate starsmashing negaspheres of space opera – humour and sex.
He pythonised it. I can’t read any space opera anymore now without thinking of Banks’ worldy and snarky Mind space ships.
“It Was Here When I Got Here.”
Try Market Forces as well. It’s standalone and gloriously bleak.
Banks likes to have his cake and eat it too though. Pure parody of space opera is pretty tedious but Banks likes epic space battles and massive hardware enough that the mordant cynicism is tempered by some real affection.
He has made it impossible for crap like Honor Harrington to be taken seriously though, which is all to the good.
Iain M. Banks’ account in “The Algebraist” of human female Rear-Admiral fighting her fleet through an expected and unavoidable attack is up there with Forester or O’Brien at their best.
Or take “Execession” with all the Minds plotting and doublecrossing eachother while trying to outspeed eachother as well. Iain understands what space opera is really about. It’s all about the ships, the travels and the battles.
“What Are The Civilian Applications?”
imho, Altered Carbon is a better book than angels, and in fact, most of his others. Dumb? No doubt, but gloriously, action-movie dumb. I feel like Morgan writes about someone firing a gun a lot better than the preconditions for it. This said, I would be interested in reading The Steel Remains, apparently it’s almost insanely gory and insanely sex-scened up. He’s certainly a different voice, latter-day pulp fiction I would say, and definitely highlights the anodised nature of your Hamiltons, et al.
Re: impact on characters of dystopia, it’s certainly an interesting question in context of a masterful writer like Le Guin. Her characters are so three-dimensional and inherently alive, in books like The Dispossessed, there’s no doubt the world/s have had an impact on the characters, but it doesn’t reduce them to humanity-lite.
I think it also raises the question of when something qualifies as a dystopia. It’s a fine line between just run-of-the-mill shit and dystopia, you know? I’m thinking particularly of this in a fantasy context, because I think the line gets a lot blurrier there. In something like Martin’s never-to-be-completed Kings series, the whole world is in a civil war, strange undead killing people, famine, disease, etc. Yet because it’s not a contemporaneous or future setting, we seem to dismiss it as not dystopia. Yet something is very wrong with the world as it stands.
I guess I like the dystopias best that show it’s not all doom and gloom, or inherently immoral etc. That’s why I love The Dispossessed so much. Arguably, both worlds are quite fucked up, and yet both have their good sides, also. I think this is important; I don’t put much stock in “NAZIS=BAD” kind of dystopias. It’s largely pointless I think, harking to a ‘slippery slope’ argument (which I abhore) and also allowing the reader a convenient breathing space with which to dissassociate.
Far better to have a more complex dystopia that forces the reader to actually evaluate the merits or otherwise of a given world and hopefully through that, our own – which would, after all, most likely be regarded as a dystopia by the vast majority of its human inhabitants (who didn’t win the conceptual lottery and get born in a developed country).
‘Broken Angels’ was terrible when compared to the original ‘Altered Carbon’. He wrote a third in the series also, but then stated it would be the last. I suspect that after the outstanding success of the original novel he was contracted to write two more but had no material.
After the disappointment of BA, I certainly wont be reading the last one. I have read his second to last novel ‘Thirteen’ recently, and it seems to be little more than an alternative interpretation of the character and plot of Altered Carbon. I suspect the author doesn’t have much more to offer. Also his characterisation is a little misogynist. All the men are gung ho commando types or corporate skunks. His women are smart and successful, but inevitably busty and looking for a strong man for casual sex – which he is happy to describe in far too much detail.
I actually own a copy of ‘Market Forces’ but cant bring myself to read it; it sits patiently on my beside. Anyone who thinks Chomsky and Pilger provide an insight into the modern world is mistaken. The plot line to the novel appears to be similar to any of Pilgers’ recent articles and that’s fiction enough for me.
Iain M Banks is a political crank whose worldview is severely distorted by the writings of the Chomsky/Pilger crowd. His ‘Culture’ novels are his interpretation of the successful Communist paradise to come; once we get past the unimportant stuff like allocation of resources and the coercion required to achieve it. He does this by postulating a world where science can achieve anything including creation of worlds etc… and where the petty rivalries of human ambition have been superseded by super-powerful but benign computers. It’s easy to be a Communist when there is no requirement to enforce the party line.
I agree that Altered Carbon is superior to Broken Angels. Mark, you might feel differently about Morgan if you give his first novel a go. It got me to purchase BA, Woken Furies, Black Man and Market Forces, so it must have something going for it.
MC, I quite enjoyed Market Forces, despite my supposed ideological myopia. But then again, my standards aren’t high as long as I’m reading something a bit new, a bit different.
A lot of the online reviews say that the third one in the Kovacs series is the best – Woken Furies, so it’s interesting to hear the contrary here! Jarrah, I do plan to read Altered Carbon, but it will go in the queue behind Liz Williams’ The Poison Master – which I started last night:
http://www.sfsite.com/04b/pm150.htm
Interesting, patrickg, because I suspect that’s the point that Morgan is trying to make in the Kovacs universe. But perhaps there’s not enough there to really make us reflect. To some degree the potential of ‘sleeving’ to shift motivations, raise questions about the continuity of identity over time, etc, is also underplayed compared to what might have been.
I do agree that dystopia is perhaps too broad a term of art.
I’m not sure I had exactly the same feeling, MC, though I can definitely see how one could think that. I found the female characters generally much more likeable and well drawn. Admittedly I’m only going on the evidence of one book. I think there might be an element here of the difficulty in maintaining a parody of a form without really excellent writing skills – which is a problem generally for Broken Angels (though he doesn’t write badly compared to some – to me – unreadable sf authors). If it’s not pulled off expertly, you really do reinscribe the same tropes and (in this case misogynist) assumptions you’re purportedly trying to undermine.
I think you hit the nail on the head there Mark, re: Morgans motivations. The guy is pretty clearly a leftie and I too feel his women as as well – or better – drawn than his men. I think the sex scenes are pretty bad, but not inherently sexist, per se. This would seem to be borne out by The Steel Remains; I believe 95% of the graphic sex scenes in it are gay sex scenes, which doesn’t really strike me as something that a chauvinist hetero would go into so much detail about.
I guess my problem is that Kovacs’ world does feel too removed, I think in some ways this is the medium – Joel Silver-like action movie transformed to book with spaceships – may be interfering with the message a bit here.
I’m not really an Alistair Reynolds fan, but one thing I think he really gets is how easily humanity can change into something else with the right/wrong augmentations/limitations. It’s something that could apply to the sleeves, too, but doesn’t really seem to.
The guy can write an action scene though I’ll give him that; Altered Carbon in particular has some cracker moments in it.
Actually, patrickg, I’m just back from the city and bought a copy and read the first chapter on the bus – you’re definitely right about the action scenes! If anything, the writing seemed to me to be better than in the second one – which may be a facet of more editing as a first time author!
I do have the feeling that he’s got a pro-feminist political position and that might inflect the characterisation consciously – but again I’d go back to what I said about the difficult balancing act between inhabiting and subverting genre/narrative forms.
I hope the gay sex scenes are more sexy than the straight ones!
The Steel Remains is a kinda interesting book, actually, partly cos the protagonist is enthusiastically gay (kinda the ultimate taboo in swords and sandals epics) and partly cos the politics is much grittier than in most genre fantasy.
MC said
“It’s easy to be a Communist when there is no requirement to enforce the party line”.
MC – If you think the Culture is a communist system then you either don’t understand communism or Bank’s writing.
Yep Chad. If anything the Culture is more libertarian-arnachist tempered by as Banks points out a distressing tendency to meddle in the affairs of others.
Also don’t let MC know but it’s actually science fiction.