Woken Furies is the third book in the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy by the British science fiction author Richard Morgan. I reviewed the first book, Altered Carbon, in September 2009 (here). The second book I never reviewed on its own. It’s called Broken Angels in any case. Each of the books stand on their own, and there is little dependency on the previous one to read the next. Actually I don’t think it matter much which order you read them in at all.
In the first book, Altered Carbon, Kovacs is on earth, some time in the future, when we have colonized the nearby solar systems. He is investigating a murder, and you have your classical private detective story in a curious futuristic and pretty bleak setting. Added to this is Richard Morgan’s rough touch. His characters and settings are pretty hardcore. Violence and sex is frequent, yet suits the story very well.
In the second book, Broken Angels, Kovacs is investigating an alien planet where a corporation is trying to secure an alien portal in the middle of a war zone. The aliens, the Martians as they’re referred to, is an alien race that once inhabited Mars and a number of other planets about a million years ago. They left technology and ruins, and a lot of mysteries. The interest of this portal causes violent fights between corporations, and our “hero” is in the middle of it.
In this third and last book, Woken Furies, we meet Kovacs back on the planet where he once were born. In this version of our future, the human consciousness is stored in a chip implanted in your spine, so you are able to change body if you should die or just want an upgrade. Also, as a means of punishment, you may be put in storage for decades or even centuries. Kovacs reappear after being in storage for a long time, finding a planet not much like the one he grew up on. This book is about politics and is centred around a revolutionary character from the early days of the settlement of the planet. Old revolutionaries which have spent the better part of the last couple of centuries in a small surfer town, is called to arms and the revolution is back on. This is yet another fascinating and imaginative book that keeps you interested from page one. Maybe the best one of the three in my opinion. Yet I wouldn’t want to miss any of them.
