Reviews

These are a series of books by Richard K. Morgan set hundreds of years in the future in which we have colonized other worlds on distant stars courtesy of found technology - technology found on Mars. The technology is a combination of faster-than-light broadcasting, personality recording, and body reproduction such that one's personality is beamed to a distant location faster than light and "decanted" into a new body, the initial people there having traveled by spaceship to set up the receiving stations and such. Anyway, our main character is sort of a private eye named Takeshi Kovacs (TOK-eh-shee KO-votch) who is drawn into intriguing situations. In the first book, it's pretty much a film noir story set in the future with cool technologies. It works, and is a good ride. In the second and third books, Kovacs winds up solving the riddle of the "Martians" whose technology we use to enable quick space travel. Broken Angels is the better of the second and third books in many ways, but both are good rides with lingering film noir characteristics. All in all, I recommend these books for a good ride. They aren't "literary," but are well done and fun. Mind you, I listened to these, and the reader was very good, which makes a big difference.

George Orwell had the good fortune -- or misfortune, depending on your perspective -- of being an honest man in an exceptionally dishonest time. The world has always been filled with liars, of course...

The Dormant Beast is a near-future story, which is to say, harsh, grubby, and convoluted. Bilal gives us the now-mandatory Blade Runner anticipations of days to come, the mise-en-scene a politically dystopian automobile graveyard draped with wiring and rife with multinational neon, omnipresent logos, and endless flickering security cameras and computer screens....