Woken Furies, Richard K. Morgan’s third tale of Takeshi Kovacs, gets much deeper into the character than Altered Carbon or Broken Angels. Kovacs maintains his sociopathic charms, but a nuanced complexity emerges. Woken Furies starts off heavy on complex plotting and speculative technology, to the point of confusion, but eventually rewards the reader as the stage settles and the plot plays out.
Kovacs is a highly skilled mercenary with meta-human capabilities due to his training as a United Nations Envoy. (What’s up with the UN as bogeyman in recent sci-fi?) He doesn’t have super powers, but his augmentations make him a cut above a normal thug for hire. For example, Envoy’s have perfect memory recall. In Altered Carbon he was essentially a private dick. Broken Angels turned him into an interstellar “Man With No Name”. Woken Furies sees him as a “ronin”, returning to his home planet of Harlan’s World. Grudges abound, but there’s an underlying honor to the mayhem that Kovacs generates.
Of course Kovacs is such a wanted man that someone’s gone to the trouble of resleeving an earlier version of himself and sicing the younger Kovacs on the elder.
On Harlan’s World, 90 percent covered in water, Kovacs is systematically taking vigilante vengeance against a radical religious group. On the lam from this church, he joins up with a mercenary crew tasked with decommissioning extremely dangerous, leftover sentient military hardware. As part of a skirmish gone awry, Sylvie, a member of the crew, winds up channeling Quellcrest Falconer. Channeling? This may actually be reincarnation. Falconer is a revered revolutionary, whose teachings have greatly influence Kovacs. A return of the leader of the Quellist movement would shake the foundations of society on Harlan’s World. As part of saving Sylvie, Kovacs bonds, as best he can with her crew. They work together to figure out if and how Falconer can re-emerge on Harlan’s World.
One of the neat conceits of Morgan’s Kovacs tales is the concept of sleeving, putting someone’s recorded consciousness into a new physical body, often technologically augmented. As long as your stack, a small spine embedded cylinder, is intact you can be easily reborn. Not exactly a revolutionary concept but Morgan’s stylings give the sleeve concept a gritty plausibility. For example, having one mind in two sleeves simultaneously is well nigh sacriligeous. Kovacs brutality is also magnified as his anti-faith rampage involves tallying the stack destruction of priests.
So throw the conflict of the present self with the past into Morgan’s pot. Add in political philosophy and intrigue, not to mention questioning the morality of religion by a distinctly amoral character. Layer in heavy doses of violent action and forward looking speculative tech. Mix it all up with Morgan’s literary stylings, he’s been compared to Raymond Chandler and has some of the techno-cultural elegance of William Gibson, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good book.
My only criticism is that the early chapters of Woken Furies were really confusing. I just couldn’t get a clear picture of the mercenary runs in my head. And there are a plethora of characters to keep straight. I had to do more than my fair share of backtracking and rereading.
However, I can recommend Woken Furies for your literary pleasure. As the first of the trilogy Altered Carbon has an advantage, and is clearly the best of the bunch. But Woken Furies is a satisfying conclusion, if Morgan is to be believed, to Kovacs journeys.