Broken Angels (Gollancz)

Other ingredients include sex, voodoo, torture, multiple betrayal, cool military technology, incomprehensible alien constructions, age-old cycles of catastrophe, and--above all--extreme violence. The screw is turned further and further, beyond what seems possible. Readers may find themselves forgetting to breathe. This is a rattling good yarn, for the strong of stomach. --David Langford

Reader Reviews:

combat sleeves/neurochem/martian artifacts/ oh my.... (0/0 people found this helpful)

I was intrigued by altered carbon but was poleaxed by broken angels. Combat sleeves,neurochem,martian artifacts, oh my. This novel had everything I was looking for in read. Not giving enough of a pause for a breath it careens from page to page in a fever dream of hard action and intrigue.
....cheers

I am hooked. (0/0 people found this helpful)

I bought Altered Carbon on a whim, in a 3 for the price of 2 deal in a bookshop in England. I have subsequently bought all of Richard Morgan's works. I finished Broken Angels last night on a flight back from Geneva. Looking forward to starting the next although I have 2 new Bernard Cornwell novels and a pile of other books waiting. That is how good Richard Morgan is! He is first and foremost an excellent writer. Whether Sci-Fi is your thing or not is irrelevant - the books are mystery thrillers and action-packed and thought-provoking. In between the breathless action sequences they actually have something to say about us as humans. 5 stars are not enough.

A Stunning Sequel (3/4 people found this helpful)

'Broken Angels' is the second outing for Envoy-trained Takeshi Kovacs and is an absolutely rip-roaring continuation from the original 'Altered Carbon'. The plot unwinds with breath-taking speed; the action comes fast and furious, bolstered by excellent levels of technological details and character descriptions.

Yet Morgan's second outing has met with a fair amount of criticism leveled at under-developed ideas or poor style. Both criticisms are unfair and miss the point of what the novel is trying to achieve. 'Altered Carbon' introduced us to ideas of sleeving, cortical stacks and humans being decanted into either real or virtual worlds. Morgan takes this much further in 'Broken Angels' and asks us to think about what will happen to human beings who live at the interface of technologcal developments, and how that technology will affect both what we are as persons as well as our own sense of who we are. The brilliance of 'Broken Angels' is that he asks us these questions via the characters who are working at and in extreme situations where the rules of who we are are constantly being redrawn all the time. And he does it by using the Martians (the Broken Angels of the title) as a mirror of civilisation so far ahead of us, yet still seemingly sharing the same weaknesses and vices.

This is the clue to the style and why he sometimes writes in very short, staccato sentences. As some reviewers have noted he does. Sometimes write. Like. This. But all you have to do is look closely; he only does it when people are speaking. And usually, he only does it when people are speaking under incredibly stressful circumstances or life and death situations. In these situations, people rarely speak in complete sentences. They speak short, quick-fire and often incomplete sentences. This is what Morgan does here - his writing mirrors the reality of the way we speak when stressed and the characters are much more realistic because of it.

All in all, this book is a welcome return for Kovacs. The character is so much more developed and, for once, we get to see the man's inner thoughts and processes which helps us understand quite how he does what he does and how future genetic conditioning can take human beings in all sorts of unexpected directions. Brilliant, insightful, and highly entertaining. Well worth every penny.

A tiresome read (3/7 people found this helpful)

I loved Altered Carbon, so much so that I could not put it down, and found myself reading it at 3am! However, I did not enjoy Broken Angels at all - I am genuinely surprised that the continuation of ideas and protagonist from Altered Carbon could produce such a drudge of a sequel.

I did notice some major differences between Altered Carbon and Broken Angels. First, Morgan repeatedly breaks up. speech with full. stops. I found this very irritating. Secondly, Morgan seems to spend much longer describing Kovacs' mental strife. Some of Kovacs' psychological issues seem slightly unfounded, which reinforces the question of why Morgan spent so long writing about them. Morgan's descriptive streak also strongly touches on the 'war is hell' cliché, which does get old as the book progresses.

The plot was stagnant, with much time spent waiting for (what the reader knows is) an inevitability. No real sense of tension ever built up during this time, possibly because Kovacs is too superhuman, so the reader knows he will escape any situation.

In conclusion, I found this book a bore to read. The plot was lacking, there were few fresh ideas, many sci-fi clichés were rehashed and the ridiculousness of Kovacs' character became apparent. The writing was overly descriptive, so much so it became quite farcical. I would not recommend this book to anyone!

Second book syndrome (12/15 people found this helpful)

I enjoyed Altered Carbon, even thought the writing was a little uneven. The concept of sleeving was interesting and Kovacs was a great, flawed charachter. The follow up, Broken Angels, is disappointing however.

It once again follows Kovacs on a mission that is littered with bodies, violence and betrayal, this time on Saction IV, a world wracked by civil war.

First, a little niggle. The writing has got a litle smoother but throughout the book, Morgan insists on breaking up. His sentences. With full stops. Initially this is fine as it conveys a sense of how the charaters thoughts are disjointed, but after a while, when everybody is doing it all the time, it gets to be really annoying.

As fo the plot, well that is centred on the discovery of a long-abandonded Martian spaceship. Exciting stuff, but really the ship is little more than a McGuffin, a device for Morgan to hang a standard, military-ation SF story around. Most of the book is descriptions of various soldier-types doing various soldierly things and then regretting violence in a rather unconvicing fashion. And Kovacs keeps escaping because he is an Envoy - a little bit like Superman, with one bound he was free. Consequently, whilst the book is quite exciting, and moves at a good pace, there is no depth to any of it and at the end you feel unsatisfied and disappointed.

In addition, there is a rather bizarre voodoo sub-plot that not only seems out of place, but doesn't actually lead anywhere. That, combined with an odd Martian ghost sequence leaves the reader (or at least this reader) puzzled and confused. Did Morgan intend there to be a supernatural tint or was that just local colour? Were there ghosts or not? How did Kovacs survive the spaceship battle? Distracting.

Further, apart from the sleeving, the sci-fi elements are dull. No cool guns or weapons, standard space suits and ships, no amazing advances or changes. The Martian spaceship is equally disappointing without any great revelations or points of interest. It's advanced but we're told that rather than seeing it.

Richard Morgan

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