haLobEnder Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 I picked up Woken Furies the other day not realizing it was the third in a trilogy. Are each of the stories self contained or should I start at the beginning? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
delete this account pls Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 Woken Furies works as a standalone, but its better if you read the first one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jacen Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 Fat Belwas: SPOILER: Broken Angels Semetaire is in the book early on as a character. He's the guy masquerading as the voodoo personification of death. He is the guy selling the cortical stacks by the bucket full in that "soul" market. Kovacs and Hand go to him to round up a strike team for their mission. Beyond that, he is in unimportant to the politics of the plot. Kovac's just thinks of Semetaire all the time because meeting the guy fucked him up, and Sem. causes Kovacs to think about his long personal history with violence/death/indifference and Kovac's guilt associated with all that. And yes, Kovacs was initially sent by Harlan's World Quellists to aid Kemp, who began his revolution in the spirit of Quell's overthrow of the tyrannical local government. However, as time went by Kovacs realized that A. Kemp was a selfish hypocrite - slowly becoming worse than the government he was trying to overthrow, and B. that Kemp was probably going to lose the war. That is why Kovacs switched sides. Hope that helps. Halo Bender: You don't have to read them in order, unlike some series, but I would highly recommend it. You have to understand Kovacs to understand why he is doing what he is doing in Woken Furies, and the other books will give you a better idea about how the tech, worlds, places, settings etc. works. Altered Carbon is the first book, Broken Angels the second. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mashiara Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 Having read all three books of the trilogy plus [i]Thirteen [/i]this past year I still think [i]Altered Carbon[/i] is my favorite, with [i]Woken Furies[/i] coming second. I found [i]Broken Angels[/i] to be the least enjoyable of all, it nearly turned me off him. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Finn Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 [quote name='mashiara' post='1671813' date='Feb 2 2009, 20.16']Having read all three books of the trilogy plus [i]Thirteen [/i]this past year I still think [i]Altered Carbon[/i] is my favorite, with [i]Woken Furies[/i] coming second. I found [i]Broken Angels[/i] to be the least enjoyable of all, it nearly turned me off him.[/quote] I really liked the first three quarters of Broken Angels, but I thought it went off the rails in the final quarter. And it wasn't just the not-properly-motivated mass slaughter of the rest of the company. The revelations about the female lead struck me as wildly implausible as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
automne Posted February 8, 2009 Share Posted February 8, 2009 R. Morgan is becoming one of my favorite writers even though I have read only two of his books. I found [u]Altered Carbon[/u] really good but not as good as [u]Black Man[/u] which is simply excellent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 [quote]Broken Angels started to turn me from Kovacs as a character. His complete punishment of his former squad mates made me sick[/quote] Yep - it's supposed to. Of course, it's worth bearing in mind his former squad mates are amoral psychopathic stormtroopers - if that helps :) Of course, that's a description that goes part way to explaining Kovacs himself as well. Difference is, he's become terminally tired of that state of being. This is a level of enlightenment Carrera's Wedge have not yet attained. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 Further to that point about Kovacs' bad behaviour in Broken Angels, here's a discussion from my website a little while ago, in which just such concerns arose. A certain DJ (name, not profession, I think) posted this: [quote]I recently loaned the Takeshi Kovacs books to a friend of mine, who's in training to be a Marine officer. He loved the first book, then decided that he actually hated Takeshi for killing the Carrera's Wedge guys at the end of Broken Angels because they used to be his command. Up until that point I don't think I'd realized how deep the first-blush pack-loyalty mentality ran. I find myself wondering if it's a male thing, a military thing, or some combination of both. I think you were really onto something with the wolf gene splice.[/quote] And my - rather rambling - reply was this: [quote]Yeah, your friend isn't the only one who took Kovacs' meltdown in Broken Angels badly - I've seen quite a few comments along the same lines. Like you say, that pack loyalty thing is pretty primal, and to offend against it is for a lot of guys (especially guys, I think) the ultimate crime. To be honest, it would be hard for a close combat unit to work any other way; you've got to have something pretty powerful to weld a group of potentially fractious and competitive males together enough that they're prepared to give their lives for each other. And that in turn, of course, is how you get your common or garden wartime atrocities - rape, pillage, torture, summary execution, all that good shit. Any vacillation or decency individual soldiers might suffer in the face of that kind of thing is going to tend to get sublimated in the group loyalty - so even if you don't actively participate, you'll certainly clam up and stonewall any attempt to bring those who did to justice. Symbolically, that's exactly the hell that Carrera's Wedge are trapped in at the end, and in some senses, you can see Kovacs as some kind of dark angel liberator, back from the dead and the other side of the gate to set them free from the unending cyclical horrors of the war. Of course, Carrera and the Wedge might justifiably not see it that way! To be honest, I don't blame anyone for reacting badly to that sequence - the way I wrote it, it was very much intended to be an ultimate betrayal, and with it the ultimate demonstration of how unsafe Kovacs is. At that point, it no longer matters if it's his own flesh he's mutilating or his former comrades he's slaughtering - the demon is out and there is nothing to be done. The fearsome Wedge finally meet their match in a raw destructive force that has even less moral agenda than they do. In a sense, for that insane spell, Kovacs becomes the spirit of war incarnate (maybe with a sardonic helping hand from Semetaire), and that spirit eats them alive. For me, a lot of Broken Angels was built around a conscious attempt to disillusion all the people who read Altered Carbon and thought Kovacs was a lovely fella. No, he's really, really not.[/quote] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shortstark Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 Well Richard i figured that Kovacs wasnt a pussycat in that sequence in Altered Carbon when he went crazy on the surgical team, but i thought he was loyal to his own, reading him annilhiating the Wedge was a bit of a body blow to be honest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jacen Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 So... Mr. Morgan... what the hell do we have to do to get you to write another Kovac's book? You [i]know[/i] you want to write about the Unsettlement, part fucking Two! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sheep the Evicted Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 [quote name='Jacen' post='1679469' date='Feb 9 2009, 02.41']So... Mr. Morgan... what the hell do we have to do to get you to write another Kovac's book? You [i]know[/i] you want to write about the Unsettlement, part fucking Two![/quote] I doubt that it will help any but i'll add my pleas. I'll even through in an arm and a leg. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fat Belwas Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 Thanks, Jacen. Um, there was one other thing bothering me, about Semetaire, if you don't mind answering more questions. SPOILER: Broken Angels After the Martian ghost scene, Kovacs has a dream where he meets Semetaire on a beach. That confused me like hell, and I'm sure there is some significance behind it. You wouldn't happen to know what that all means, would you? Oh, and, I thought this was cool: [url="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/"]http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/[/url] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jussi Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 It looks like the sequel to Steel Remains in now called [i]The Dark Commands[/i]. The book was previously known as [i]The Cold Commands[/i]. [url="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Commands-Gollancz-S-F/dp/057507793X/ref=sr_1_135?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234307842&sr=1-135"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Commands-Goll...42&sr=1-135[/url] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 :( The Cold Commands sounds better. Don't know if it's the alliteration, the fact that it seems less generic, or both. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmail Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 Funny, i served in the infantry for three years, and perhaps i can see a parallel with the marine officers reaction. But the problem for me is that Kovacs might be tired of this terminal fighting, and he's changing, thats great, but he never gives his former squaddies a chance to change as well. But he doesn't just kill them, he slaughters them in the most abhorent way. In a world were one could concievably live forever, he kills them permanently. Fries their stacks all around. For some reason as that entire sequence was going on i kept imagining him cutting out their stacks, putting them on a plate, frying them and then spreading syrup on them before he dug in. Stack cakes. There is no denying that Kovacs is a fucked up guy, that his moral compass has been flash fried and tossed out the window somewhere around 45 years ago. But this total disregard of his former unit, men who he had fought with, over what is essentially a few people he got to know over a couple of months, strikes me as somehow false. I just can't see it happening. Which is too bad, because i'm just not willing to invest more time seeing where Kovacs ends up. Because it doesn't matter, there is no redemption, no reason to watch his deeply psychotic actions sink any further into the morass. I never thought that Kovacs was a good guy, he proved that in Altered Carbon, though you seem to consciously disuade the idea that he's entirely fucked up by his continuing interaction with the female leads. But even the clinic scene in Altered Carbon does not hold a candle to this event. Any number of people, having seen what Kovacs has seen - and done - could probably torch a bunch of people at random in a clinic. But the ingrained training that is involved in unit formation, now thats tough to break. Guys do, of course, most notably that sgt. that threw a grenade into a commanding officers tent in Iraq a few years ago. But this is an entirely new level, and one that just seems too much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max the Mostly Mediocre Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 [quote]I never thought that Kovacs was a good guy, he proved that in Altered Carbon, though you seem to consciously disuade the idea that he's entirely fucked up by his continuing interaction with the female leads.[/quote] I thought the point of those interactions was along the lines of--yeah, he has a conscience. Some empathy. Maybe a code of sorts. So what? Does any of that really make him a better man? How [i]much[/i] better? Could very well be wrong, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GoN Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 [quote]I don't need to see his protagonists screw two people every book in the most explicit fashion.[/quote] I do. :smoking: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stego Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 Richard, what are the chances of you making it out to a Worldcon? I'd love to drown you in lager and discuss Black Man. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balefont Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 [quote name='Ghost of Nymeria' post='1682741' date='Feb 11 2009, 07.53']I do. :smoking:[/quote] Seconded. Sometimes reading on public transport can be tough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balefont Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 [quote name='Stego' post='1682746' date='Feb 11 2009, 08.11']Richard, what are the chances of you making it out to a Worldcon? I'd love to drown you in lager and discuss Black Man.[/quote] I already asked, darling, and he said he couldn't make it. Else he'd be spending an evening with Stego-Balefont bookends to each side. :P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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