Woken Furies: A Review
Spoiler Warning: I discuss many of the important plot points so stop now if you want to be surprised.
In his third Takeshi Kovacs novel, Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan brings Kovacs back to his home planet, Harlan’s world, a world ruled by an hereditary plutocracy. Centuries before this plutocracy was almost deposed in a revolution led by a woman calling herself Quellcrist Fallconer. After Quell’s death they granted many concessions in order to quell that revolution. Our own plutocracy did something similar with the New Deal and Great Society programs, programs used to placate the American public and forestall a communist revolution. No longer afraid of such a revolution the plutocracy sees no reason they should allow those programs to continue. So too the first families of Harlan’s world are taking it all back, driving the population into greater and greater poverty, just as Quell warned. (This enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged to the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.)
Kovacs lives in a universe where an individual’s personality and experiences are continually downloaded into a "stack" which is sort of a hard drive implanted at birth . When a person in this universe dies his stack can be removed, implanted into a new sleeve (body) and then he/she will live again.
Kovacs is a former "envoy" turned criminal, criminal being one of the few careers open to an ex-envoy. While making an illegal living Kovacs is also on a quest for personal vengeance against the religious sect that tortured his ex-girlfriend to death and dropped her and her daughter’s stacks into the ocean so that neither could be resurrected.
In all the Takeshi Kovacs novels the subtext is revolution, at least for me, and the principal character is writer/poet/revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer. Her words are peppered through each book even though she never appears, not until Woken Furies.
Escaping from a sticky situation embeds Kovacs with a group of mercenary soldiers cleaning up self-evolving machines left over from Quell’s revolution centuries before. The command hardware implanted in the brain of one of these soldiers seems to have been contaminated with a different personality and this personality seems to be Quell’s. At least maybe.
When I finished Woken Furies I found myself dissatisfied. Like all of Morgan’s books it’s a good read. The universe and characters he describes are well developed and interesting. His portraits of the physical environment are amazing but in the end it was like expecting a meal of heart-killing fried chicken and then getting some low-fat gourmet chicken breast. Good but not what I had a taste for.
I wanted Quellcrist Falconer. That was what I had a taste for. From the previous Kovacs books, I had developed certain ideas about Quell. I thought she would be like the whirlwind, sweeping everything from her path. I expected her to be like Lady Dewinter in The Three Musketeers, except political. Remember when they changed De Winter’s guards merely because she’d spoken to them and thus might have persuaded them to help her. I expected Quell to be like that. A force of nature. Castro a la Rospierre. But this Quell could not even convince Kovacs of the rightness of her cause and Kovacs wanted to be convinced, wanted to believe.
In the end I decided this resurrected Quell was only a sketch of Quell, not the real thing, not the full personality.
I did like Morgan’s idea of a revolutionary force that blends back into the population to live their lives, then, when the conditions are right, ripe, when revolution is possible, like the plant Quellcrist, they emerge and grow within weeks.
I was also disappointed at the ending. We were given a Quell who could win a revolution not because the people supported it but because she had gotten control of the lethal orbital defense systems left by a previous alien race. Sort of Deus ex machine. Not a revolution. A coup. Revolutions grow from the people. Coups are forced on them. This revolution, if it succeeded, would have been a technological success, not a human one.
That is what I thought the first time I read Woken Furies.
Then I thought about it off and on for a year. Then I read it again. This time I decided the book wasn’t about Quellcrist Fallconer even though I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be about Quellcrist telling us how to wage a successful revolution against a hereditary plutocracy. But just because I wanted it to be about that didn’t mean it was. Woken Furies doesn’t tell us that secret except in the sense of the Quellcrist weed, that a revolutionary must blend into the population but, when conditions are right, emerge and fight again.
Perhaps Quell wasn’t the whirlwind. Maybe no successful revolutionary is. In Peter A. DeCaro’s Rhetoric of Revolt: Ho Chi Minh’s Discourse for Revolution, Ho seems a gentle man who worked for his country’s freedom for decades, for his whole life. Like Tom Paine, the person who made the American Revolution, Ho was primarily a poet and writer trying to inspire his countrymen to support the struggle for freedom. He also seemed to be a man who impressed everyone with his goodness, sort of like Nelson Mandela. So the Vietnamese revolution, when it came in 1945, was successful with barely a shot fired. Then, like the American Revolution, there was a fight for independence, but the revolution part, that was all but nonviolent. Maybe Quell was supposed to be like that. Maybe her iconic status was due not to the force of her personality but the result of a lifetime of work. That aside, Woken Furies is not about Quell. Not even about Revolution.
What Woken Furies is really about is Kovacs and about his having been an Envoy. Envoys are what John Perkins called "jackals" in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. When progressive movements arise, when leaders try to work for their people, when they won’t be bribed or blackmailed, when they will not allow the global plutocracy to rape their country, the jackals are sent in. Jackals are covert ops/CIA/intelligence operatives, sent in to assassinate, to organize riots, coups, civil wars, to stop progressive movements, progressive revolutions, to stop anything that would take power and wealth from the local and global plutocracy. The plutocracy uses envoys to pummel the population into submission so the greedy can take their resource wealth and exploit their labor. That was what Kovacs did when he was an "envoy."
Now I understand why I was dissatisfied the first time I read Woken Furies. I wanted something from it, something Richard Morgan didn’t or couldn’t provide: The secret of how to make a successful revolution against a cruel, exploitive, entrenched plutocracy. That is what Quell did. Or nearly did. How did she motivate people to support a struggle to end their own subjugation? Apparently Morgan doesn’t know the answer to that question. Or doesn’t say.
But that was my fault because in the end Woken Furies isn’t about Quell or revolution. It’s about Takeshi Kovacs, the ex-Envoy/covert-ops/jackal trying to get justice even if he has to make it himself, make it personally.
This brings me to a hope, a fantasy, that some of America’s jackals, the people who really know what is going on, what orders the plutocracy gives, that one or more of these people might become disgusted with what they have done, been ordered to do, and begin to fight against their masters, might testify before Congress or work more covertly against the plutocracy. Is that possible?
We live in hope. Or make it ourselves.
Quotes from Woken Furies:
"Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened." [like the GOP is chipping away at the New Deal and Great Society programs.]
This enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged to the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return. [Quell’s warning about the return of the predatory plutocracy]
The Occasional Revolution, in which she argues that modern revolutionaries must when deprived of nourishment by oppressive forces blow away across the land like Quellcrist dust, ubiquitous and traceless but bearing within them the power of revolutionary regeneration where and whenever fresh nourishment may arise. Quellcrist Falconer
Quellcrist, also Qualgrist, native Harlan’s World amphibious weed…remarkable only for its unusual lifecycle. If and when stranded in waterless conditions for long periods of time, the plant’s pods dry out to a black powder which can be carried by the wind over hundreds of kilometres. The remainder of the plant dies and decays, but the Quellcrist powder, upon coming into contact with water once more, reconstitutes into microfronds from which a whole plant may grow in a matter of weeks.
…the Quellcrist powder that Konrad Harlan’s self-described harrowing storm of justice had blown far and wide in the aftermath of the Quellist defeat now spouted new resistance in a dozen different places.
The Quellist meanwhile slipped away, disappeared, abandoned the struggle and got on with living their lives as Nadia Makita [Quellcrist’s original name] had always argued they should be prepared to do…And twenty-five years later, back they came, careers built, families formed, children raised, back to fight again, not so much aged but seasoned, wiser, tougher, stronger and fed at the core by the whisper that persisted at the heart of each individual uprising that Quellcrist Falconer herself was back.
Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: "..I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing" [This is how I feel about any woman who adopts Islam or even Christian fundamentalism.]
There is thought and there is action. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins. Quellcrist.
…he’d seen them all prove their ability to adopt Quell’s maxim and get on with living a full life when armed struggle was inappropriate.
Rage at injustice is a forest fire - it jumps all divides, even those between generations.
Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it….Kovacs
"You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into … poverty again. This isn’t an enemy that goes away."
"The oligarchs aren’t an outside factor… A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They are programmed to feed off the rest of the body at no matter what cost to the system in general, and to kill off anything that competes. That’s why you have to take them down first."
"Yeah, I think I’ve head this speech. Smash the ruling class and then everything’ll be fine, right."
"No, but it’s a necessary first step.""It’ll be so good," said Andrea, "To have someone again who knows what to do." [this is why I don’t think this is Quell. This sketch of Quell doesn’t know what to do.]
An Envoy to Kovacs: "You remember the drill: minimize local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the protectorate, hang onto data for future leverage."
"And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force?"
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© Alllie 2006
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