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Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan by alllie Spoiler Warning: I discuss most of the important plot points so stop now if you want to be surprised. In his third Takeshi Kovacs novel, 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:
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Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan by alllie Richard Morgan's Market Forces is a combination of John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman and a demolition derby. It is set in a future where there are still highways but little gas so only a few corporate masters still drive and they participate in Road Warrior duels to resolve corporate rivalries. Two candidates for a job, decide it on the road. Come back with blood on your wheels or don't come back at all. I didn't like it as well as Morgan's two previous books, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, mostly because, in the end, I didn't find any redeeming value in his major characters. Chris Faulkner is a killer, killer on the road and in the office. The fact that he has some liberal tendencies doesn't make up for his willingness to kill bad guys and rivals in the most brutal ways possible. True, the people he kills need killing. But so does he. He's one of them.
Chris Faulker is a specialist in conflict investments, i.e., making money off wars, revolutions, conflicts, by selling the participants toys of war and repression and then manipulating outcomes so the side that will yield the most profit wins.
Yes, this is the world of the future. Except this is a standard manipulation in the present, the "structural readjustment" insisted on by the IMF so leaders can be lent big money, thus allowing control of a country by deliberately putting it into massive debt. Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman explains how it works today. Sickening today and sickening tomorrow. The book is saved only by Morgan's ability to write. His action scenes are riveting. His violence is pornographic. As is the sex. But what Chris Faulker does for a living is too close to contemporary reality. Only the road warrior stuff is science fiction. Rating: |
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Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan by alllie Spoiler Warning: Not much. I only reveal the setup Broken Angels is Richard Morgan's second book and like his first, Altered Carbon, features super-soldier Takeshi Kovacs. In Broken Angels we find Kovacs 30 years on from Altered Carbon, now a hired mercenary fighting to defeat a war of rebellion on a foreign planet. There are alien artifacts, nanobots, corporate culture, sex, and lots of fighting. We see more of how immortality is something only a lucky (or very unlucky) few get to enjoy. Broken Angels was better than Altered Carbon in many ways. It was sharp, no wasted text, everything in service to the story. It had a sense of suspense that kept me turning the pages. I had to know what would happen next. Broken Angels is a very exciting work but in the end not as satisfying as Altered Carbon because there was less substance. Broken Angels was really only about soldiers fighting, killing and dying. Paid soldiers, bred to fight, bred to viciousness and loyalty. Broken Angels had no underlying sense of hope, something Altered Carbon had once the quotes from Quellcrist Falconer showed up. While Broken Angels had more Quell quotes, there was no longer a sense that they came from a brilliant leader fighting against a universal corporatism, from a leader pointing the way out. Broken Angels didn't show the corporations and the plutocracy as more than a minor and distant enemy and the rebel Kemp was painted as just as evil as those he was fighting. There seemed to be no real enemy except human nature. Everyone was evil. As humans fight to claim, sell and exploit alien artifacts even the long dead aliens are found to have been mired in wars. But still, it was a good book. I enjoyed reading it and I intend to keep reading anything Richard Morgan writes. But I want …hope. Even from a scifi novel set 500 years in the future. I want a story that shows a way someone; anyone, can beat these bastards down and free us from them. That's the thing about capitalism. It's a system without hope. It's law of the jungle. There's no utopia at the end of the rainbow. Just more struggle and competition till the day you lose and die. Even if you allow yourself to be exploited the most you get is a temporary safety but once you are no longer useful to your masters, you will be cast aside, allowed to die or even be killed. You have no value beyond your value to the greedy goals of some corporate structure or some rich individual or to the plutocracy in general. We are fodder to them. We are their prey. The nilism of capitalism is why capitalists ally themselves with Christianity, Christianity with its perfect passivity, with its turn-the-other-cheek, with its when-a-man-takes-your-cloak-give-him-your-coat-too. Christianity with its promise of rewards only after you are dead. Thus the herd is steered into an ideology that keeps them weak and helpless, that keeps them from fighting against exploitation, and that keeps them mired in the hope of an illusionary afterlife. Opiate of the masses. Pie in the sky by and by. The afterlife: when the rich will burn for their evil and the poor be rewarded for their suffering. Which pretty much leaves the rich and powerful to pillage unopposed in this life. There has to be some way out of this trap. ~~~~~~~~
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Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan by alllie Spoiler Warning: Not much. I only reveal the opening. Altered Carbon is a murder mystery with a hard-boiled detective in the mode of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade or Lew Archer, but it's a murder mystery set 500 years in the future. Murder, real death, is a hard trick in the 25th century because at birth everyone has a "stack" implanted in their brain. A stack seems to be something like a hard drive. An individual's very consciousness is stored in his stack along with his memories, his beliefs, and his personality. I'm not quite sure what a brain implanted with a stack does on its own. At any rate, when a person dies, his stack is removed, and, if he has the money or insurance or the people who love him do, he can be put into another body, called a sleeve.Unless he is Catholic a person only really dies when his stack is destroyed. The Catholic Church has forbidden its believers from being resurrected in this fashion. As a result, for most people there is no "real death," although without a new body they might end up permanently in storage. The very rich get around the danger of stack destruction by backing up their stacks like you would back up a hard drive on your computer. Thus, if their stacks are destroyed they might lose a day of their memories, but that would be all. They also grow clones so they can be placed into a new body of their choosing. The very old, very rich are called meths, short for Methuselah. One of these meths, Laurens Bancroft, has his head blown off and his stack vaporized. It would have been real death except that he had a backup and is alive again in a new body, just missing a day or two of his memories. The police say "suicide." Bancroft refuses to accept that he killed himself and leases a criminal named Takeshi Kovacs to investigate his death. Kovacs had been an "envoy" which seems to be some kind of supersoldier/space marine, but he had left that life behind and turned to crime as a less harmful pursuit. His envoy training gave him an increased ability to assimilate information and an enhanced awareness of patterns so he was hired by Bancroft to find out who killed him. The futuristic world Morgan draws for us is fascinating in and of itself, but there's also a raft of interesting characters in addition to Kovacs. Halfway through the book it got even more interesting, at least to me, because a political subtext became apparent. Kovacs was from a planet called Harlan's World which had been a police state until a rebellion led by a woman named Quellcrist Falconer, a rebellion against the rich and powerful. The book begins to quote Quellcrist and I could see that even 500 years from now our true enemy is still a rich and powerful elite. They use people like us impersonally, but as Quell says, we should take it personally:
This quote comes right before Kovacs takes something very personally. The book begins to quote Quellcrist and as the story took on this new demension I went from interested to fascinated.
Since I think the human race is being turned into dogs worshipping the rich masters who kick them, I found that poem very telling. What Quell said about lackeys: Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets. There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic. Quell When they ask how I died. Tell them: Still Angry. Quell More and more I began to wish this book was about Quellcrist Falconer. But what was most telling is a statement by an old, rich and powerful meth:
Yes, that is what the rich think. That human life, our human lives, have no value. And we have no Quell to help us fight them. Rating: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I sent author Richard K. Morgan the following email:
and got the following response:
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HARRY
POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: by RiRi In this, the darkest of the Potter series, we find Harry Potter shedding the last vestiges of innocence and naiveté as he comes to terms with the costs of the battle he has chosen. Peopled with the muggles and wizards and witches and elves we have come to know, Rowling comforts us with the familiar while setting out a winding path that leads to unexpected surprises that sometimes make us gasp. The characters we have known as evil are revealed to be a bit less so, the characters we have considered good are revealed as flawed and the characters we thought infallible turn out to be, well, humanlike. Rowling's genius lies as much in making the ordinary seem extraordinary as it does in making the extraordinary ordinary. Harry learns about love, mystery, honor, revenge, anger and limits in this, the next to last of the Potter saga, if we are to believe J.K. Rowling. I am deliberately not revealing details of the story; I would not be that cruel to those who have not as yet enjoyed the suspenseful and satisfying experience of reading this. Rowling is poised to take her place among those few writers who
have made each book of a series a jewel…forming a chain with
no weak links. Tolkien, Herbert and very few others make up this
group. J.K. Rowling is well positioned to take her place among these
greats. I am sure that the final battle between Harry and He Who
Must Not Be Named will cement her place alongside these giants,
in addition to being the final adornment in the unique niche of
greatness she has already carved out for herself. Rating: |
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The Fountain at the Center of the World by Robert Newman Reviewed by Alllie This is one of those books that before you are a few pages in, you know it's gonna be great. By the time I had read 20 pages I was going online and recommending it. It's one of those books you start reading and you can hardly put it down till you finish. It's very Dickensonian, in the very best sense, making real the lives of the poor, the global poor, as well as the WTO rich. It follows the lives of two brothers, Chano, a poor Mexican activist, and Evan, adopted by a rich British family, one of the World Trade Organization's movers and shakers. There's a Prince and the Pauper touch as well when the poor brother replaces the rich to speak to those in power, who, of course, hear only what they want to hear. There's also the story of Chano seeking his lost son Daniel who always seems to be flittering just out of his reach. I believe, as humans, that we like our lessons wrapped in stories, that stories makes it easier for us to learn and to understand. The story of Chano and Evan and Daniel is wrapped around a lesson about globalization, about the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and the Mexican maquiladora plants near the border, plants that pollute the environment and poison their workers - because they can. The human stories make the global economic stories easier to understand. It's also wrapped around the Seattle protests against the WTO, making them mythic in an almost John Reed way. It makes you wanna be there, well, except for the beating and shooting and gassing…. The Fountain at the Center of the World is a book about global issues but also about personal issues and how the two intersect. That's something that's left out of books these days. People in most books seem to live in a vacuum, unaffected by global issues while, in reality, all are affected. The Fountain at the Center of the World shows us how we are affected, shows us in the stories of the dying Evan, the despairing Chano and the lost Daniel. Despite Evan's wealth, his intelligence, his support for and his knowledge about the system, he is isolated even in his death. Chano and Daniel are surrounded by friends and allies who help them survive and escape as they try to make the world a better place. As does this book. Well worth the read!! Rating: |
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The X-President by by Philip Baruth by alllie This was a good book, a page turner set 60 years in the future when America is on the losing end of what are called the Tobacco Wars, wars that have their origins in two of Bill Clinton's minor actions while he was president, the expansion of NATO and the Anti-Tobacco Accords. The protagonist is Sal, the official biographer of the 109- year old Bill Clinton. Sal, along with three covert ops, is sent back in time to change the past and thus the future. She is drafted and forced to go because she knows more about Bill Clinton than anyone else in the world. Changing the past involves kidnapping the 16 year old Bill Clinton in 1963 and taking him to 1995 to convince his future self to avoid certain actions. It's a little scifi with the paradoxes of time travel but mostly it's a book for political junkies with much mention of the players and the scandals from the last dozen years. It's so well researched and written and includes so many facts that when it includes fictitious events I found myself assuming they were real. (There was no Anti-Tobacco accord propelling American Tobacco companies into foreign markets.) The book is not really friendly to Bill Clinton, though not totally unfriendly either. It sees his flaws and his gifts. Despite it being such a political book I couldn't tell what side the author was on politically. I did learn two little conspiracy facts or fictions: 1) that Kurt Muse, who sounds like a CIA asset, was the real reason for the invasion of Panama and 2) that Timothy McVeigh had met both George Bush and General Schwarzkopf (couldn't find anything on that so it might not be true). It also uses the team's visit with the young Bill Clinton (aka, yBC) as the reason for Clinton's lifelong conviction that he was supposed to be president. Anyway, it was a fun book to read and can be enjoyed by both Clinton's supporters and detractors. Rating: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I got the following email from author Philip Baruth
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One thumb down for not treating Bill Clinton better. |
Roosevelt's
Secret War : FDR and World War II Espionage This book by Joseph E. Persico (with forward
by Colin Powell) is an interesting read in Pub Date: November 2001 Rating: |