Takeshi Kovac, mad killer, body hopping ex-Envoy Agent returns home to Harlan’s World-where we find him busy body hopping, killing lots of people and using his Envoy skills. Oh yeah, he has sex with a couple of people as well.
Woken Furies has a lot going for it. Many of the mysteries from the first two books are explored and Takeshi seems to have a mission in life for a change. On the other hand, his mission is killing off fundamentalist believers, so that may not make him much of a hero in some people’s eye.
I’ve read other sci-fi books where the simple cure to religious differences is genocide, but it doesn’t seem to work out too well in the real world. Of course, Takeshi’s whole kill anything that moves philosophy of life isn’t a very good real world thing, either.
I listened to the Audible audiobook version of Woken Furies, which was good but not great. They used a few too many production tricks for my taste-they added echoes and odd reverberations and the occasional sound effect. For the most part I just want a good reader who can give enough difference to the characters that I can tell them apart.
The story of Takeshi Kovac spans a couple of hundred years and a couple of hundred light years as well. There have been two characters who speak to Takeshi as disembodied voices in his head-Quellcrist Falconer and Virginia Vidaura. One was a revolutionary and the other was an Envoy trainer. They both tend to speak in his mind in snappy one liners.
One of the more important facts of life in Takeshi’s universe is the presence of Martians and the heaps of advanced technology they left laying all over the place. It’s Mars Tech that has lead to the vast human empire that spans worlds. But no one knows much about these pesky aliens, other than the fact that they had wings and they all up and disappeared one day-half a million years ago.
As with Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, the story ends on a pretty good note. I like where all the alien stuff seems to be heading. But each of the books happens in it’s own little universe with very few references to what has gone before. It’s easy to imagine more books in the series that only mention the events here is passing.
I liked Woken Furies better than the other two books and look forward to more stories form Richard K Morgan.
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Looks more like a movie poster than a book cover.
That’s fits, it reads like a Vin Diesel movie.