BROKEN ANGELS

Slashdot review HERE
(I only skimmed the slashdot review but that guy is a dork and doesn't know what he's talking about)

Broken Angels is the sequel to Altered Carbon, which was a cyberpunk/detective novel. Well, when I say sequel, it's not really a sequel: it has the same main character but everything else is different (setting etc) so you could read them in any order.

Broken Angels is even cooler. It has a bad-ass tough talking Clint Eastwood type dude with a sense of humour as the main character, lots of gratuitous violence, intrigue, sexy guns and hardware, and it's a real page turner. I read it in a few days. You dont know whats going to happen next, so you read it fast as fuck. Good characters, believable story (well, you know what I mean) and strong dialogue.

The hardware has a Shirow (Ghost in the Shell) manga feel, and the suited military are like the Starship Troopers novel - imagine if they had made that movie properly, that would have been awesome.

Altered Carbon has been optioned for a film, that would be awesome. His books have more style and substance than any scifi I've read since William Gibson first made an impact on me 17 years ago.

Started MARKET FORCES last night, that's rad too.

Awesome INTERVIEW with R Morgan here

“I'm writing 'Kovacs #3', Woken Furies, now, and what's driving it is a fascination with Kovacs himself. He's got to make some decisions about the way he sees the world. If Altered Carbon has got some analogies with The Big Sleep, and Broken Angels had some inspiration from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, then I guess for the third one the root inspiration is North by Northwest and The Thirty-nine Steps. It's more of a chase thriller, with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing all over Harlan's World in search of things. It's back to the noir staples, in the sense that there are bad guys out to get him, all sorts of weird interests where he can't work out what's going on, and a sort of femme fatale figure, but there's more exotic travel. The Martians left behind orbitals circling Harlan's World, which basically means you can't go up in the air, so getting places takes a long time -- there's an old-fashioned feel to it. It's more extensive in range, and I think it's also more intensely personal. This is Kovacs's novel more than the other two were. Most of the book is about how he comes down from his fixation with vengeance, always having blood on his hands, to a slightly more socially constructive point of view. So I don't think it will be quite as grim as Broken Angels.”