Summary: Woken Furiesis Richard Morgan's third noirSF adventure starring combat veteran Takeshi Kovacs, who debuted in Altered Carbon(2002; winner of the Philip K. Dick Award). Kovacs operates in an interstellar future of extreme violence and exotic weaponry, where swapping bodies is as easy as trading in an old car.
The setting is Harlan's World, 95% ocean, where ancient alien orbital systems still vaporize anything that flies too high. Kovacs, older and madder, is running a private vendetta against Taliban-like fundamentalists whose principles--in a world where death is reversible--forced an old girl-friend and her child to die permanently. Wounded and on the run as usual, he escapes by joining a "deCom" squad hunting down human-built weapons systems that don't want to be decommissioned. Soon he's entangled with a woman who (some of the time) seemsto be a reincarnation of long-dead revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer…
Meanwhile, the dictatorial ruling family of Harlan's World has set the deadliest possible assassin on Kovacs' trail--an illegal copy of his younger self, in a brand-new body.
High-energy complications follow. There's unexpected violence in a virtual-reality monastery. Kovacs and "Quellist" sympathizers plan a crazy James Bond assault on an impregnable island fortress, an attack that ends in a surprise twist. The idealistic Quellcrist (if that's who she is) has the key to a genetic time-bomb never before used: "A whole new form of death." Even those implacable orbital weapons that smite high-fliers with "angelfire" have secrets of their own.
Morgan's knack for grisly set-pieces and heart-stopping violence makes for compulsive reading--emphatically not for the squeamish. Against all odds, his fast-moving choreography of pursuits, escapes, shoot-outs, reversals and betrayals finally ends in a satisfying touch of compassion, a trace of hope. A superior SF thriller. --David Langford