I sent off my review of Broken Angels, by Richard K Morgan, to Fantasyliterature the other day. Here are a few random thoughts I didn’t include in that review:
While I thought the starship was neat, I didn’t like Broken Angels as much as Altered Carbon or Woken Furies. Some things I just want to quibble with, because they are across the board in Morgan’s dystopian future-noir series.
Corporations. They are evil and don’t care about people. Yes, all right, but so what? Corporations are about survival and growth. I understand that the companies in Broken Angels are making money off the wars; getting to use the relaxed wartime regulations to innovate and stuff, and I understand that they don’t care if civilians die—except, at some point, they do have to care about that. People equal market share. A planet of dead civilians doesn’t pay taxes to its puppet government; no taxes mean no money deals for the corporation. Is this logical?
Religion. Mr. Morgan, make up your mind. Either three major Earth religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, missed the boat (literally) and never made it off Earth—although Shintoism and voodoun did—or they did make it to the stars, and conspired with the governments and the corporations to muzzle the academics and control the research done on the alien race who colonized Mars millennia ago. You cannot have it both ways.
You have a character state that the Earth religions couldn’t handle the fact that there was a civilized, technologically advanced alien race because it dented their credibility. This is just silly. I personally have known at least two Catholic monsignors who could incorporate space aliens into the Catholic cosmology without breaking a sweat.
No, what the earth religions should have an issue with (and did, in Altered Carbon, anyway) was your digital storage of consciousness.
Picky points, I know, but this is something I’ve had problems with through all three of these books and the book Thirteen, which I read first. There are gaps in Morgan’s created worlds, and things are not thought through. It feels like he’s saying, “Corporations evil—‘nuff said, just go with it.” I am a reader who is more than happy to fill in, but the writer has to do some of the work. Are there synagogues in space or not? Give me that—heck, give me one—and I’ll probably go along with the rest of your rather lame religious argument. Give me none and expect me to take your word for it? I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work that way.
Broken Angels is good science fiction if you like military action adventure. I was disappointed to see Kovacs, instead of attempting to subvert the dominant paradigm, basically leading its victory parade in this book. It’s a good thing I know that subversive Kavocs comes roaring back in Woken Furies.