Rating: 
Summary: Get. Over. It.
Review: After the success of his first novel, "Altered Carbon", it would have been a difficult task for Morgan to come up with an equal. Unfortunately, he has not.
One of the problems of a science fiction series is that the introduction to the series presents us with a new world. Our enjoyment often comes from seeing how psychological and social functions alter to fit the new society, and in turn, how that illuminates the psychological and social functions in the readers' lives. Besides updating the detective novel of Hammett and Chandler, "Altered Carbon" allowed us to understand the effects of portable personality on individuals and society. There's not much more room for this development in this novel.
We still have the same hard-boiled Takeshi Kovacs as a hero, (assuming we can use that word to describe a highly skilled winner with no principles) but now he is a military adventurer who will work for the highest bidder. He undertakes the task of opening a gate to a long dead society for an evil corporate giant. His comrades are a squad of hardened professional soldiers and an attractive archeologist. His opponents include a corporate suit, and a general. Once again he engages in battle with assassins, soldiers and high technology killing machines. He continues to have enough attraction for several of the female characters to provide a few explicit sex scenes.
But there is little new in the character. His experiences do not transform him, or us. The final shot-out could have been in almost any space-cowboys opera.
Moreover, I felt that there was a long sequence near the end of the book designed to appeal to our sadistic tendencies, or at least our anger at large groups. There is a painful torture and then a massacre that adds little to the story but perhaps may satisfy the reader's need for aggressive behavior.
The author has the annoying habit of showing us that a speaker is pausing between words by using a period and capitalization between words, as in "they were. Screaming." Apparently Morgan finds the punctuation devised in English to show pauses inadequate. It's. Annoying.
Without giving away major points, many of the environments and situations presented are reminiscent of other science fiction works. In "Altered Carbon" that worked to illuminate the hard-boiled detective genre. Here it just seems to reflect a lazy imagination.
It's time for Morgan to scrap Kovacs and invent a new society if he wants to keep writing science fiction. We should read this book without great expectations.
Rating: 
Summary: Make Stuff Up on the Fly
Review: At one point in this novel, lead goon Takeshi Kovacs says "we make this stuff up on the fly" to describe his group of operatives. One could possibly say the same about Richard Morgan's writing style. This continuation of Morgan's debut novel, Altered Carbon, is an interminable mishmash of poorly constructed suspense and gratuitous violence. Morgan introduces some intriguing themes here concerning corporate domination, the futility of warfare and revolution, and even the state of religion in the face of alien culture. But these themes are lost in a splatterfest featuring little more than tiresome action scenes and pointless infighting among the characters. The biggest thing missing is any insight into Morgan's concept of "resleeving" in which one's personality can be downloaded and placed into a new body. The last novel made great use of this concept in explorations of what it really means to be human, but here it's just an excuse for dozens of characters to be brutally murdered then brought back to life as candidates for psychological torture.
Morgan has tried extremely hard, and failed, to create suspense through interpersonal rivalries among the characters. What's sorely missing is the art of foreshadowing, which should be second nature to any experienced writer of mysteries or drama. Instead what we have here is wave upon wave of characters betraying and selling each other out, followed by implausible rescues out of nowhere (i.e. Carrera's Wedge), only to lead to the discovery of another diabolical scheme, which is then defeated by the lead character, who then finds that there's an even bigger scheme being cooked up by yet another peripheral character, ad nauseam. Without adequate foreshadowing by Morgan, this is not suspense but false cleverness and intricacy, in pursuit of negligible thematic or character development.
Meanwhile there are absolutely no likeable characters in this book. This goes especially for Kovacs, whose deepest thoughts are about whether he should kill everyone in sight now or later. Kovacs sees nothing but betrayal and hatred in the other characters (plus demeaning thrills from the women), to the point where it is impossible for the reader to like the characters either. Meanwhile, Morgan's sci-fi universe is intriguing but mostly hollow, as his way of creating strange new worlds is merely to make up quasi-futurist terms like chameleochrome, technoglyph, or bubblefab without explaining them, as if simply typing them were enough for the reader's imagination. This extremely annoying and violent novel may have been written with movie rights in mind, as it would translate well into an empty sci-fi action flick starring Will Smith, with maximum gore and minimal dialogue or character development. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating:
Summary: Great but...
Review: Having purchased and read both "Broken Angels" and "Altered Carbon" based on recommendations and reviews here, I feel compelled to offer this. I found both books tense, original, and well written, however the author seems committed to including very explicit sex scenes that strike me as unnecessary and graphic to the point of pornography. Usually I pass on books to friends and my teenage children. These won't make the rounds and I'm honestly wondering if I'll even keep them in my collection. Too bad - Richard Morgan is an excellent writer otherwise with tremendous insight and compelling ideas.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as groundbreaking as Altered Carbon but a great read
Review: I deeply enjoyed the gritty, dark, extremely violent Altered Carbon and was hoping for a similar thrill ride in Broken Angels but found myself a little wanting. The Kovacs we meet in AC seems to have changed quite a bit in BA, and you'll find yourself wondering about his motivations. The depth achieved in AC is not reached with this second installment as Morgan seems to have been focused more on politics and philosophy than action and violence.None of this means that BA was not a great book and well worth the time. If you liked AC then this is a must read, if you're just discovering gritty hard core sci-fi I'd grab Altered Carbon first and check out Asher while you're at it.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe I'm spolied, but...
Review: I didn't enjoy this as much as "Altered Carbon." The technology is old news, and the story's not as engaging.
It's a decent-enough read, but I enjoyed "Altered Carbon" better.
Rating:
Summary: Hmm ... Disappointing
Review: I read Altered Carbon, and found Morgan's style impressive. When I bought this book, I was hoping for more of the same. But I was disappointed in the end.
The only thing that is the same is the level of graphic violence - VERY high. This is not a story for the faint of heart.
I was simply not happy with this novel. Some of the suspenseful areas seemed overly contrived. There was a little excitement in the story, but nowhere near enough to keep me interested.
The biggest problem is that it seemed to be severely lacking in logic. I kept telling myself "you've GOT to be kidding - this is ridiculous - they can't keep doing this!"
Rating:
Summary: It's not Altered Carbon, but it's still fantastic
Review: Last year I read Richard K. Morgan's first novel, Altered Carbon, and was blown away. Such smart, edge-of-your seat darkness is hard to come by. But it also meant that Morgan set a very high standard for himself in his debut. Broken Angels is a wonderful book and I recommend it. It's a page-turner, but I have to say it isn't as hard-hitting as Altered Carbon. Still, to say that it is not as good would be unfair because the two books can't be compared. Where Morgan's antihero, Takeshi Kovacs, was ex-special-ops-turned-private-eye-by-circumstance in the first book, this time he returns to his military roots as a mercenary fighting a planetary rebellion. The mystery novel is a genre that lends itself to the twist and turns that makes Altered Carbon great. Morgan (perhaps smartly) avoids comparison by choosing a much more subdued wartime setting for this adventure. One thing that remains constant is the darkness; you can't get more noir than this. While Morgan's consciousness-digitizing technology was cool and mind-bending in the first book, here it is dehumanizing and bleak. In one scene, Kovacs goes to a "souls market" where piles and piles of "stacks" (digitized personalities of real people) could be bought. Death is no longer the worst punishment possible; centuries of torture can be inflicted on your digital self. War and the attendant death have lost meaning. All this and the zero-sum power games played by governments, corporations, and guilds seem to contribute to Kovac's increasingly nihilist worldview. Another difference that I wasn't so thrilled about is that while Kovacs was cast as a beat-down mercenary and half-hearted criminal just trying to "get to the next screen" in the first book, here he ultimately finds himself in the middle of one of the most important events in human history. I was expecting more of the anonymous and reluctant protagonist, so I guess I was a little thrown off. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic book, and Richard K. Morgan is a great writer who I'm sure I'll pick up again. If you like Altered Carbon, you should definitely give this a shot. And is you haven't read Altered Carbon, what are you waiting for?
Rating:
Summary: Re-heated Gibson.
Review: Morgan is billed as a next-generation Gibson, but, to me, he came off more like a sci-fi Tom Clancy. The story is basically a video game plot with lots of unimaginative 'war porn' set on a colonial world as a group of mercenaries try to figure out abandoned Martain technology. The characterizations are also video game like; the main protagonist is especially strange, as he's a genetically-modified warrior who is apparently a sociopathic killer, but he spends the entire novel having existential and emotional crises.
If you like reading cliched descriptions of interstellar war, you'll like this, but you are probably better served playing Halo or Doom 3.
Rating: 
Summary: As amazing as the first effort
Review: The first novel in this series, Altered Carbon, set up the story in Broken Angels. This writer has an amazing ability to mix prose and brutality, thoughtful introspection and all out mayhem. Scary what resides in our heads!!!
Rating:
Summary: Very Very Very Good, But Not Great
Review: The second Takeshi Kovacs book (following the outstanding Altered Carbon), is less of a character-driven crime novel and more of a sci-fi treasure hunt. Set some 30 years after the events of Altered Carbon (about 500 years ahead of our time), the story begins with Kovacs as an officer in Carrera's Wedge, the most feared mercenary company in the stars. The Wedge is currently employed by the Protectorate to suppress a nasty little insurgency on the relatively insignificant planet of Sanction IV. Kovacs is none too thrilled about his role as enforcer of the multi-planetary conglomerates in the suppression of the pseudo-Marxist rebellion, and when fate offers him the chance to cash in big if he deserts, he grabs it.
In the Kovacs series, humans have managed to navigate the stars with the assistance of a rather incomplete understanding of Martian star charts. However, the trick of traveling faster than light hasn't been figured out, so space travel mostly consists of "needlecasting," a process in which one's consciousness is digitized, sent, and then "resleeved" in cortical "stacks" that are implanted new bodies. The reason Kovacs deserts is that there is a rumor that an intact Martian starship buried on Sanction IV, outside a city blanketed in fallout from the ongoing war. Humanity has never seen a Martian starship, and its worth is incalculable. Kovacs and the slippery character that recruits him make their way to a government concentration camp, where they free the archeologist who had been working on the project.
Morgan handles the next part of the story well, as the trio seek out a backer for their scheme. Admirable realism os displayed in walking through how even a band of rogues needs a backer to pay for all the specialized equipment they'll need, even if it means dealing with a corporate executive they can't be sure they can trust. There are various complications in finalizing the plans, including the assembly of a team of specialists. This is one of the most inventive sections of the book, as Kovacs visits a "Soul Market", where a voodoo figure sells the bloody stacks of war dead by the kilogram! Once finally assembled and debriefed, the team arrives at the site, where they attempt to open a "gate" to a distant star system where the Martian starship is sitting. While doing so, they must content with not one ticking clock, but two! There is the heavy fallout, which is rapidly killing them with radiation poisoning, and a frightening defensive nanoweaponry system which evolves in response to their countermeasures. And, as with so many team treasure hunts, there is mysterious sabotage, hinting at a traitor in their midst...
Up to this point, the book is almost every bit the equal of Broken Angels, however the last quarter or so is a bit disappointing. I'm not a big fan of sci-fi or fantasy where the protagonist is at the center of events that have repercussions for all of humanity, and that's certainly where this one ends up. In both books, Kovacs spouts a lot of angst about his training as a killing machine and how empty and cold-blooded he has become. However in Altered Carbon, all the mayhem he unleashes is more or less deserved, and he does end up making sacrifices to save a person he cares for. In this outing, he kills a lot of innocent bystanders, and rather implausibly becomes emotionally entangled following an intense virtual sex encounter. All of which is to say, while Kovacs is the same character, he sure doesn't seem to act the same. The book is also slowed down a bit by a bit of backstory involving the various factions of Martian archeologists. It's still a very, very good book, and well worth reading if you liked Altered Carbon, or are simply a fan of science fiction. It's full of top-notch action, intrigue, and some of the better-written sex scenes I've encountered lately.
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