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The Richard Morgan Thread III


AncalagonTheBlack

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In the Kovacs novels it's mentioned that at some point all AIs had to be registered and licensed and that any that went rogue were destroyed.  I think it's in Altered Carbon when TK is describing the Hendrix and the Corporate Wars.

 

And then in Woken Furies there's a decent amount of backstory that skirts around this with the Decom on New Hokkaido, the mimints, sleeper personality bombs, etc.  

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In my Lucifer's Star books, I drew a distinction between "Cognition AI" (all powerful super AI) and "Dummy AI" which is only about as smart as a human being in personality and has no ability to grow.

You don't need the former to run your Hotel.

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Thanks for the inputs. My memory of Altered Carbon isn't too good, I guess. I'm halfway through Thirteen right now and what started as a great book is almost ruined by the Bakker style philosophical wanking. I almost feel like I'm reading Neuropath.

That said, the reveal of what the prologue scene was all about was so horrific. I should have seen that coming. 

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11 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

In my Lucifer's Star books, I drew a distinction between "Cognition AI" (all powerful super AI) and "Dummy AI" which is only about as smart as a human being in personality and has no ability to grow.

You don't need the former to run your Hotel.

A good distinction, but the AI wasn't designed to run the hotel, iirc, in this situation it ended up running it due to how it evolved and then the restrictions that were placed on AIs after the corporate wars prevented it from doing much else.  You also don't need (AC spoilers) :

a machine gun in the lobby but the Hendrix has that too.  It's not just a hotel, when they want to plant the virus to take down Kawahara the Hendrix helps them out, I'm assuming out of something more than guest loyalty

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11 hours ago, Hello World said:

Thanks for the inputs. My memory of Altered Carbon isn't too good, I guess. I'm halfway through Thirteen right now and what started as a great book is almost ruined by the Bakker style philosophical wanking. I almost feel like I'm reading Neuropath.

That said, the reveal of what the prologue scene was all about was so horrific. I should have seen that coming. 

Eek, I fear you might not enjoy the rest - I recently re-read it, and I'd say the second half has some of the most heavy-handed of the philosophical conversations (both internal and vocal). Some parts threw me off here and there  - the plot definitely meanders its way around, and I agree that it drifts into a bit of wankery. In general, though, I rarely enjoy re-reading a one-off novel as much as I did that one. Hope it comes together for you. 

I have somehow never read the Altered Carbon series, and should really get a copy already.

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On 1/8/2018 at 9:57 PM, Argonath Diver said:

Eek, I fear you might not enjoy the rest - I recently re-read it, and I'd say the second half has some of the most heavy-handed of the philosophical conversations (both internal and vocal). Some parts threw me off here and there  - the plot definitely meanders its way around, and I agree that it drifts into a bit of wankery. In general, though, I rarely enjoy re-reading a one-off novel as much as I did that one. Hope it comes together for you. 

I have somehow never read the Altered Carbon series, and should really get a copy already.

This kinda describes all of his novels. Altered Carbon is probably his most focused, and even it succumbs in parts. Don't get me wrong, I really like RM's stuff for the most part: he has really amazing ideas & occasionally incredible prose... but it sometimes/often feels like its teetering on the edge of collapse into unintentional satire. Market Forces and his fantasy trilogy in particular.

That, and his sex scenes are a bit much. Not that the sex bothers me, rather the show-off intent lurking beneath.

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8 hours ago, kuenjato said:

This kinda describes all of his novels. Altered Carbon is probably his most focused, and even it succumbs in parts. Don't get me wrong, I really like RM's stuff for the most part: he has really amazing ideas & occasionally incredible prose... but it sometimes/often feels like its teetering on the edge of collapse into unintentional satire. Market Forces and his fantasy trilogy in particular.

That, and his sex scenes are a bit much. Not that the sex bothers me, rather the show-off intent lurking beneath.

So much this. You can almost hear him screaming “look how edgy I am!” As you read

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I admit to never having been bothered by them. They're a piece with the hyperreal qualities of the series, and in any case, at least in the Kovacs books you're looking at genetically engineered supersoldiers or ungodly-rich sybarites who have heightened... well, everything, so it follows that the sex would be Olympic-athlete level (and then some). The extended sequence in THE STEEL REMAINS did raise my brows a bit, but mostly because my mental image of the alien folk was kind of creepy.

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The longest sex scene in Black Man/Thirteen has too many details and about six (!) paragraphs too many, but I thought the last line was memorable and a solid bit of pulpy erotic fun. Had to look it up to get it right, ha! 

Quote

And then it was like the hard evercrete steps they'd taken up to Moda, steep and stiff breathing and no speech at all on the long, steady climb together to the top.

I'm all about simile and metaphor use to describe epic sex.  

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On 1/18/2018 at 2:03 AM, kuenjato said:

That, and his sex scenes are a bit much. Not that the sex bothers me, rather the show-off intent lurking beneath.

It's amazing how often people mention they have a problem with sex, but say not a word about violence. And all of RM's work is hyper-violent.

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7 hours ago, Yohn said:

It's amazing how often people mention they have a problem with sex, but say not a word about violence. And all of RM's work is hyper-violent.

Maybe because the sex scenes are boring, and the violent scenes are not? :P Also, violence is par-for-course in these kind of highbrow pulp, but the sex, as someone else mentioned, feels deliberately edgelord, which gets eye-rolly after a short while.

Seriously, though, he does go overboard quite a bit. There's lots of Technical Porn and fussy Brand-Dropping (even when it's made up), reminding me of American Psycho.

 

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Here's my short rundown:

I *LOVE* Altered Carbon and think it's one of the best cyberpunk/sci fi novels I've ever read. It's amazing and fun with great characters as well as a stirring protagonist. I think the books after it are progressively worse and get worse as Richard tries to recapture the edginess and power of the original but only really makes Takeshi look insane. Which, fair enough, he may be.

A Land Fit for Heroes is something I clock as excellent fantasy but I also think it does run into the issue of grimdark which is the protagonists are such assholes it's hard to really care about their success at times. I also felt the ending didn't really work for me. I can't quite put it into words but while Abercrombie and Lawrence's endings were amazing and heartbreaking, this one just felt kind of stiff.

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On 1/20/2018 at 7:26 PM, C.T. Phipps said:

Here's my short rundown:

I *LOVE* Altered Carbon and think it's one of the best cyberpunk/sci fi novels I've ever read. It's amazing and fun with great characters as well as a stirring protagonist. I think the books after it are progressively worse and get worse as Richard tries to recapture the edginess and power of the original but only really makes Takeshi look insane. Which, fair enough, he may be.

A Land Fit for Heroes is something I clock as excellent fantasy but I also think it does run into the issue of grimdark which is the protagonists are such assholes it's hard to really care about their success at times. I also felt the ending didn't really work for me. I can't quite put it into words but while Abercrombie and Lawrence's endings were amazing and heartbreaking, this one just felt kind of stiff.

I love the second two Kovacs novels.  I didn't really notice him becoming any more unhinged though from the first novel.  Given that in the first one he's just trying to keep himself out of storage, but in the second two I thought his motivations are pretty understandable.  Curious as to what you mean by the part I bolded.

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2 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

I love the second two Kovacs novels.  I didn't really notice him becoming any more unhinged though from the first novel.  Given that in the first one he's just trying to keep himself out of storage, but in the second two I thought his motivations are pretty understandable.  Curious as to what you mean by the part I bolded.

The mass murder at the end of book 2# basically seemed pointless as well as directed solely by Takeshi's bloodlust. He's wiping them all out, people he fought with, in a permanent horrific manner because they killed someone else he fought with in a permanent horrific manner. Similarly, the people he teamed up with have generally done equally awful things and he doesn't kill them.

His whole "kill an entire religion" plan in Book 3# also falls apart the moment one remembers the person he's avenging was part of it too.

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12 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

The mass murder at the end of book 2# basically seemed pointless as well as directed solely by Takeshi's bloodlust. He's wiping them all out, people he fought with, in a permanent horrific manner because they killed someone else he fought with in a permanent horrific manner. Similarly, the people he teamed up with have generally done equally awful things and he doesn't kill them.

His whole "kill an entire religion" plan in Book 3# also falls apart the moment one remembers the person he's avenging was part of it too.

Gotcha. I think there was a bit more nuance than that but I can appreciate what you're saying and ymmv. 

I'd argue that in Broken Angels the fact that he picked the portal team from storage and gave them life again gave him more of a connection than with the Commando team from the war, where he was literally just a mercenary in a pointless war, and his only bond with his fellow soldiers was literally wolf DNA built into the sleeves to create a pack bond.  

Beyond that, I think there's a lot going on with what it means to be human and that the nuking of the city, played a big part in Kovacs actions at the end of the book.  He makes a choice to not be a pawn in corporate / protectorate wars.   See also, what the archaeologue did with her first team to preserve the gate.  I think there's a lot more subtlety involved than "kills his platoon for artefact".

As far as the third book goes,  the revenge story is background at best and he's destroying a terrible religion that ended in the real death of someone very close to him.  But there's also a conversation he has (some point during the second half of the book) where he talks to one of the working class religious fides and initially wants to killl him but then realizes he's just a person.

And that's really all secondary to the Quell stuff and myth vs truth and memory and what is memory and virtual and real etc.  

I guess I can agree that Kovacs could be and may well be insane but it just seems like a weird criticism.

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Well, as a criticism it's merely the fact we have these big huge "revenge" plots of Kovacs that I think don't really add much to the character other than shock value. He's an Envoy and that means he's meant to be an incredibly deadly sociopathic killer who is also a master social engineer. The reason we like Takeshi, though, is that he is a champion of the underdog and the people he goes against are worse. I think Richard K. Morgan goes overboard in those instances trying to make his overthetop violence feel emotional and justified.

But that's just me.

Again, YMMV.

I felt like the character in the first book was more enjoyable because he seemed a little more proportional in his rage.

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