Rating: 
Summary: My favorite Sci-Fi book since Snowcrash. Maybe ever...
Review: ...It would be difficult for me to overstate my appreciation and respect for Broken Angels; the second in what will be a series of novels about Takeshi Kovacs, the semi-immortal antihero who is as animated and complex as the mind-numbingly interesting times he operates in.Not since (Neal Stephenson's) Snowcrash has my thirsty sci-fi craving mind been deluged with so many fantastically interesting technology spawned drama. From "cortical stacks" (devices that sit at the base of the brain stem and record the exact neural map of their host serving as a de-facto redundant brain) to "re-sleeving" (the process of transferring the stack to a new body); from "hypercasting" (speed of light transmission of consciousness from on point to another for re-sleeving) to the "virtuals" (AI governed simulations that serve every purpose, from entertainment to torture and interrogation - all at a subjective speed of their choice...5 minutes could equal 1 year, 100 years could equal 5 minutes...not fun when someone who wants the truth out of you decides to use fire and pliers at 1,000,000X slower than real-time). At this day in age it's difficult for an author to spawn un-heard-of concepts, however, Richard K. Morgan gives life to theoretical possibility and stitches it into thrilling drama as good as any author today. Consider this is his second (after Altered Carbon) published book; we have reason to celebrate the arrival of a major force in the Sci-Fi scene. There is no doubt in my mind that this (still relatively obscure) author will be popularly regarded as one of the best in the genre in coming years. So, with that glowing preface, a bit about the book. I guess there are two principle ways I could consider its value...first, in contrast to his first work, Altered Carbon; second, to other contemporary Sci-Fi. To the first, in contrast with Altered Carbon, a book I regarded at reading as the best since Snowcrash, I consider Broken Angels a better work. In my opinion, Morgan's creative capacity for description has matured (from extraordinary to brilliant). As an amatuer writer, voracious reader, and semi-experienced reviewer, it's none to common to find an author in this genre that can combine high-minded scientific concepts with delicious prose. Altered Carbon had Takeshi Kovacs serving as a mercenary detective working for a "victim" of a suicide that (when revived) couldn't buy the explanation of the police as to the motive of his suicide. A brilliant and fantastic work. Broken Angels centers Takeshi in a much broader and complex environment. Acting as a warrior-for-hire in a massive struggle to put down a planetary revolt, Takeshi is pulled into even higher drama when he is coerced into a close-knit consipiracy to lay claim to an ancient (Martian) spacecraft; the archeological find of several lifetimes. In terms of how this novel matches up to others, as indicated at the start of this review, not since Stephenson has an author been able to "put so many conceptual balls in the air" and still maintain a cohesive, entertaining, and rich reading experience. Without giving much away, the sophistication and abundance of Takeshi's adversaries; from hyper-evolving nanotech weapons, nuke-lobbing Rebel forces, Interplanetary governments, and even his own crew; keep you turning the pages like you've been poisoned and the next page has the antidote...However, it's not just carnage, quite the opposite, Broken Angels is rich in social commentary and philosophical perspective. From the effects of semi-immortality on individual perspective to this novels exploration of "Martian culture" and the mysterious evidence of alien civilization left behind, ideas and fascinating considerations abound... So much FUN! I deliberately saved this review until my 100th for amazon. Call me sentimental, but this book is such a treasure to me. If you haven't read Altered Carbon, I'd recommend reading that first. I don't consider that necessary, but I do believe reading AC and being exposed to allot of the jargon and technical terms of the series will permit a richer experience in Broken Angels. Anyway, I hope this review was helpful. Enjoy.
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: Disappointing sequel
Review: Altered Carbon introduced some interesting ideas. It was gory, but there was some decent characterization. This one is just fight scene after fight scene. Characterization is poor, plotting is poor, and there are too many "twists". A lot like the second Amber series in that sense; it gets hard to suspend your disbelief, and leaves you not caring what happens in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not as great as Altered Carbon
Review: Altered Carbon is a great book that explored future technologies and existential issues. Richard Morgan's new book, Broken Angels is also good, but you should be aware that it's different. Altered Carbon is a thriller, a mystery where Takeshi is coming to terms with a murder and a new environment. It is action packed. Broken Angels is not as fast, but is more contemplative. It explores religion, ideology, and the human race's role in the universe. The exploration of these issues makes this book slower. However, it is still a great read and if you liked Altered Carbon, you will like Angels as well.
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: A Long Time a Coming
Review: Broken Angels is the second novel in the Takeshi Kovacs series, following Altered Carbon. In the previous volume, Kovacs had been needlecast to Earth, where he was impressed into investigating the temporary death of Laurens Bancroft, a Methuselah; that is, a rich, powerful and very old man. Larurens had apparently committed suicide just prior to the scheduled upload of his persona to backup. Kovacs waded through the sleazy environment in the back alleys of Bay City to learn the true circumstances of the death and even inflicted a little vengeance on a scum bag named Kawahara. In this novel, Kovacs is a Lieutenant in Carrera's Wedge on Sanction IV. After a nasty firefight, he is evacuated to the hospital ship for treatment and recovery from wounds. There he meets Jan Schneider and learns of a Martian artifact that had been discovered just prior to Kemp's rebellion. Kovacs joins Schneider to free Tanya Wardani, an Archaeological Guild Master, from a government refugee camp. Wardani's find is a gate, a hyperspatial link to the outer Sanction system where a Martian dreadnought has been parked for millennia. Kovacs, Schneider and Wardani gain the attention, and respect, of a corporate executive at Mandrake Corporation, one of the smaller, but growing, multisystem businesses. Hand agrees to pay them twenty million, plus needlecasts back to Latimer, for the discovery. With a group of veterans from the Soul Market, Kovacs and company camp out near the gate and Wardani starts to persuade the gate to open. This story discloses much more about the Martians, an alien species named for the site of the original find, whose artifacts are spread across human space. In fact, Martian star maps guided the first human interstellar ships across the void to Earth compatible planets. Now humans have found a functional starship for the first time, a literally priceless discovery. While the technology is very advanced, the cultures in this story have all the human flaws and foibles. Kemp is leading the rebellion of a society based on statist principals much like Marxist-Leninist communism. The Protectorate is an extension of the largest multisystem corporations, who are focused on the bottom line. Even with human persona downloads, and synthetic sleeves to house them, the death rate in the war between these two factions is enormous. The story provides several examples of individuals with high certainty in the rightness of their efforts, all of whom use humans tools to obtain their goal. Moreover, these people are not reluctant to expend the souls and bodies of any number of persons in such pursuits. Sounds familiar, doesn't it! This series demonstrates the excellence of the author as a writer, but the story itself is so intriguing that his writing skills are overwhelmed by the plot. Most of the concepts used in this series have been around for years; for example, Gallun's People Minus X included the download of human personas to synthetic bodies. However, the synergic effects of such ideas in this series actually produces a type of future shock. Highly recommended for Morgan fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of tainted heroes dealing with human corruption and duplicity. -Arthur W. Jordin
Rating:
Summary: My humble opinion of the violence in this book.
Review: Broken Angels is the story of a combat zone. If you think that the carnage described with in it is some type of ridiculous distortion (as some reviewers seem to think) of real life in war, then you may need to read up on your military non-fiction. Try Dispatches, by Herr or for something closer to our current era check out Black Hawk Down, by Bowden. These are not Sci-Fi but display a lack of humanity in war that rivals anything in Broken Angels.
Do not make the mistake of thinking Broken Angels is glamorizing war. It merely shows it for what it is and always will be- young and old, men and women, solders and civilians dying for no other reason than the whims of the ruling class, for profit and power.
Finally, for any reviewer opining on how Morgans writing is so violent and sexual; let me remind you that shows like 24 and Desperate Housewives are not about math and baking cookies. Whether you realize it or not, sex and violence are just as popular in the Blue states as in the Red. What I'm getting at is, at least in Broken Angels the writing is somewhat erudite with some form of intelligent dialogue on the nature of war, and the violence illustrated in the book makes you sick and angry (as it should). The stuff on television has no such qualms. Its only purpose is to get you to tune in next week.
Rating:
Summary: I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would!
Review: Having read and loved "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan, when I saw this book and saw some of the reviews, I definitely went for it and I was really glad. I mean, it had everything that not only makes up a good sci-fi, but a good drama as well, complete with Martian star gates and space ships no less. This one definitely ranks up there with "Foundation", "Ringworld", "Rendezvous with Rama", "2010", "Puppet Masters", "Starship Troopers", not to mention books leaning towards cyberpunk like "Neuromancer", "Virtual Light", "Cryptonomicon", "Snow Crash", and "Cyber Hunter". All are equally good reads.
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.
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