Shogun by James Clavell

Yes, really.

I first read this book several years ago, on vacation, but was interrupted by a pretty severe case of food poisoning and didn’t really pay that much attention to the last third or so.  So I recently decided to give it another shot without the horrible disease, and also in the interim having learned more about the time period and the writing itself.  You know what?  It’s pretty good for a forty-year-old doorstopper.

That said, it’s also slightly strange if you know anything about the context.  It’s sort of like if a Chinese author wanted to write about the American Revolution, but didn’t want to necessarily commit himself to 100% complete historical accuracy if it got in the way of telling an entertaining story as he saw fit.  So you end up with the totally fictional character of “Joe Rashington” who is a Virginia planter leading the Continental Army while his associates “Jake Addams” and “Hamilton Frankleen” are over in Europe trying to get allies.  And they do pretty much all the same stuff as Washington, Adams and Franklin did at the same time period, but stopping to have long conversations with a Chinese man who happens to be in America at the time and who turns out to be critical to the Revolution, and who also has an affair with someone who is clearly, I don’t know, Betsy Ross.  You can see how American audiences might be a little annoyed by it, and it explains why Toshiro Mifune caught flak in his homeland for agreeing to be in the television miniseries.

Anyway, this novel deals with the late Sengoku period, which in real life was concluded by the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu starting a dynasty that would last over 250 years.  In this novel there’s some guy named Yoshi Toranaga who accomplishes the same feat.  (It’s said that he’s the head of the Yoshi clan, which would imply that Yoshi is his last name, but everyone calls him Lord Toranaga, also implying that Toranaga is his last name, and is just one example of Clavell probably knowing better but just throwing it in there anyway.  There are a lot of these issues with Clavell’s handling of the language, but I just have to take that on other people’s word since I don’t really know enough to have my own opinion on it.)

But maybe even that is getting ahead of things a little bit, since the book really focuses on one John Blackthorne, who is the pilot of a Dutch flagged ship that runs aground in Japan.  The ship is the remnant of a small fleet that was looking to circumnavigate the globe and harass the Spanish while they were at it.  As it turns out there was an actual sailor by the name of William Adams who actually did many of the things that Blackthorne does in this novel, including becoming a samurai, although I doubt he was quite as much of an arrogant hothead as Blackthorne is, and hearing about him was actually what inspired Clavell to write this novel in the first place.

From a storytelling hook angle, the shipwrecked sailor thing is golden.  Since the audience for the book is primarily English-speakers, here’s a British guy who has something of a backstory we can appreciate without having to go into too much detail about it.  There aren’t any fellow English speakers in thousands of miles, of course, but Blackthorne is a polyglot – most of the conversations that he has in this book are probably in Portuguese with a couple of forays into Latin, but he’s reasonably capable of speaking Japanese himself by the end.  And he doesn’t know anything whatsoever about the customs, the language, or the political mess he finds himself in, which means that other characters spend inordinate amounts of time explaining this stuff to him, and by extension, us.

Blackthorne only landed in Japan because he didn’t have any other options, and as it turns out the inhabitants aren’t exactly friendly.  He finds, to his surprise, that Catholic missionaries are already there.  This is bad, since he’s a Protestant and this is after all during a time of religious strife; however, it’s also perversely good in some ways since this means there are other Europeans that he can talk to, and they’ve also taught some of the locals to speak Portuguese.  He also finds that the local samurai are used to being obeyed quickly and without question; one of his crew members gets boiled alive at the whim of a particularly unpleasant local nobleman.  Then he quickly ends up in prison under suspended sentence of death as a captive of Toranaga, who’s having some personal difficulties of his own at the moment.

Toranaga’s difficulties stem from the fact that the land is suffering something of a cold war succession crisis.  A man by the name of Nakamura (a pastiche of the real-life Toyotomi Hideyoshi) had managed to unite all of Japan under his personal rule, but he’d had a son late in life and died not too long afterwards, leaving the country under a council of five regents until such time as his son could inherit.  The regents, including Toranaga, were all powerful and ambitious men, and it was Nakamura’s hope that their mutual dislike would keep them balanced.  Nonetheless, just as Blackthorne arrives, the other four regents have joined forces against Toranaga and it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to keep his position or, for that matter, his life.  This, too, is more or less the situation as it occurred in real life.

In many ways, Toranaga is portrayed as a total dick (one of the first things he does is order the death of a man along with his infant son for a relatively minor infraction).  But as the book progresses it focuses less on Blackthorne and more on Toranaga.  And while he really doesn’t think that much about breaking his word and doesn’t really regard people as having too much value apart from how they can help him achieve his goals, he also does show genuine affection for some people and does at least enjoy life.  His duplicitous nature and harshness are actually pretty typical of the regents and the other major lords, so at least he has style going for him.

There is really quite a lot of the white-guy-culture-shock, as you might expect, some of which is handled well and some of which is a little “meh”.  Clavell does occasionally veer a little bit too far into the whole “mysterious and inscrutable Orient” thing, but at the same time it’s pretty clear that a lot of the cultural differences are just different expectations around the same fundamental experiences.  Blackthorne is stunned by how composed some guys are on his ship in the middle of a storm, and most of the Europeans discuss how the Japanese don’t seem capable of fear.  But we find out that these characters are secretly terrified, and hoping that they don’t shame themselves by revealing it.  So there’s a sense of shared humanity there, which is nice.  It’s also pretty clear that the best aspects of Japanese culture as Blackthorne experiences it are limited to the aristocracy and the samurai class, and that he’s basically enjoying himself on the lifeblood of peasants.  His increasing embrace of the culture is not portrayed as entirely a good thing, although his flexibility to be able to is (unlike his surviving Dutch crew, who are a bunch of superstitious ghastly wretches that could be extras in a Monty Python short).

There are a fair number of action scenes in this book (one of which, a boat chase, is just perfect, and another, a ninja attack, which goes on way too long) but in many respects this is a non-action work.  Since there’s technically no state of war, the major parties can’t officially attack each other.  They do anyway, of course, but through proxies, via technicalities, by holding hostages, etc.  There’s a surprising amount of time discussing safe conduct passages and who can leave where when.  A bunch of Toranaga’s allies’ relatives are held hostage in an unassailable castle by one of the regents, but since hostage taking is forbidden they aren’t technically hostages.  At the same time, if they ask to leave, the regent will think of a reason why it’s probably not in their best interests to do so, and if they try anyway there may be an unfortunate accident.  You might think that one of them would just flat-out demand to go, but it turns out to be more complicated than that.  In addition there’s a lot of written threats, and questions about who is under whose orders, and whether they’ve adequately completed the orders, and a lot of minutiae.

Anyway, I liked it.  Although parts of it are kinda overwritten and repetitive, the actual cloak-and-dagger intrigue stuff is worthwhile.  I can see how it was a phenomenon, for a while, especially at a time when less was known about the time period.  It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d see written today, for good or for ill.  The seventies were weird like that.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 4

I wrote about Part 3 of this game series when it came out, so it seems only fair to write about the conclusion here too, since it’s out and all.  And at $4.99 they’re practically just giving it away for a new-release title; I have to say that I don’t have as much gaming time as I used to before I had a real job and responsibilities and so forth, but I am enjoying the new world of digital publishing and indie developers that sell new games at under the $10 price point.

If you played the third one, this one picks up right where that one left off.  Gabe and Tycho managed to destroy the entire universe at the end of Part 3, or at least that was Tycho’s plan, his idea being that it sucked so badly that it should start over again, under the benign guidance of his niece Anne-Claire.  Unfortunately the plan didn’t quite work, since only three of the gods have been defeated and there’s one more remaining, holding a teeny-tiny bit of reality together.

And that is why your party finds itself in Underhell, which is supposedly much worse than normal Hell.

I really liked the writing in this one.  I mentioned in my previous review that the third game suffered from sticking too closely to the prose story that had been written when it didn’t look like the game would actually be made.  Without similar shackles here, and being designed as a game from day one, there was a lot more room for actual Penny Arcade humor.  I’ll be perfectly honest and say that not all of it works, but they keep it coming fast enough that it doesn’t really matter.  If one joke falls flat, there's another one just behind it.

One of the quirks about Underhell is that normal squishy people can’t hope to hurt its denizens, so you actually do most of your fighting with summoned monsters, a la Pokemon.  The monsters are assigned a trainer, and they get level up bonuses affiliated with the trainer’s stats, and one slate of abilities associated with them as well.  For example, if Moira trains Brodent, then he’ll get extra speed on leveling up and will be able to use her Gumshoe abilities, but if Jim trains him, he’ll get extra magical defense and be able to use Necromaster abilities.  He’ll still have his own slate of special attacks either way.

Like in the previous game, your characters return to full HP after each battle, your items can be used a certain number of times in every battle, and MP increases by 1 per round (subject to other effects), meaning there’s no reason to hoard items or not cast your best spells whenever you can.  Your enemies also increase in attack power and speed after every combat round, so you need to take them out quickly or risk being overwhelmed.  There are also a fair number of fights where you have additional combat restrictions or modifiers like I’ve seen in other tactical RPGs.

The game is also relentlessly silly.  Like I said above, it’s got lots of Penny Arcade humor throughout, and they’re basically daring you to take it seriously at any point, such as when a super dramatic reunion suddenly gets stuck in Japanese language mode, helpfully back-translated translated by some sort of brain-dead Babelfish knockoff.  Ostensibly you’re trying to go about destroying the entire universe, but it’s played for laughs throughout.  By the time you’re stabbing an evil god in the spleen you’ll be thinking it’s a perfectly normal day at the office.  I bet it’s also fun for the “real” Tycho to write for Tycho in this game, but I’m pretty sure in the first and second games he wasn’t such a raving psychotic.  I guess we’ll never know.  But everyone treats out-and-out murder as about as controversial as picking up a lotto ticket at the gas station.

I felt like this one was easier than the third one, or at least it didn’t kill me quite as much.  This may have been because I got familiarized with the combat style previously, but I’m not sure.  There are at least eighteen summoned monsters, most of which you will never use if you are anything like me.  The combat system basically forces you to inflict as many status effects and repeating-damage spells as you can for long fights on pain of grisly death, and that means that monsters which can’t do that for you are not going to be part of your party.  There’s maybe six or seven that have such abilities and I found a party of four that pretty handily took out everything the game threw at me, even the scary optional boss.  The game design really emphasizes its stripped-down nature, but Zeboyd may have finally stripped down a little much in this instance.  I found myself having the same fight over and over again and always winning, and by the end I was getting a little bored.  At least you don’t have to grind, as such, as once again all the encounters are right there on the screen.

The game is also pretty linear.  You will basically follow the plot for ten chapters and then get an airship, which you can use to access some secret areas and get some powerful items.  Or you can skip that if you want and just go straight to Overhell.  This is a one-way trip but you are warned about it, it’s not a surprise and it’s up to you.  I got some of the bonus stuff, but I don’t think I got all of it.  I’d say that the game is five to ten hours long, depending on playstyle.  I also don’t think there’s necessarily any replay value unless you thrive on playing the increased difficulty levels.  Perhaps I should have been on one of the harder modes, but I am essentially too apathetic about it to go back and see.

So I said that the third game was great, go get it.  The fourth game is also good, with nice humor, good storyline, and all that jazz, but at some point I felt that I’d had enough of it and I was glad it was done with.  Nonetheless, still a good show for Zeboyd and PA, and probably worth the $5.  As far as I can tell there’s no plan for DLC, so this does appear to be the end of this particular endeavor.  Congratulations to the PA guys on their first foray into game design, and maybe next time they’ll do something with a little more substance to it.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Been a little slow recently because I’ve been reading some stuff that didn’t really excite me one way or the other and I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm either good or bad to write about it.  So I went on vacation and decided to re-read some classics.  And here we go.

Lord of Light won the 1968 Hugo for best novel and is one of the stranger works of the period.  One of the things that I really like about it is how much is left unsaid and undeveloped.  In this current environment of sequel after sequel, you’d expect a whole world like this to be the setting of novel after novel, but Zelazny wrote about it once and moved on.

In describing the plot you have to read between the lines quite a bit, but here’s the basic gist.  On an interplanetary colonization ship, the “Star of India”, a bunch of human colonists left Earth some unspecified time before the novel begins.  It’s probably been on the order of five hundred years, possibly longer.  When they arrived at their destination, the crew members discovered that they had developed latent psychic powers, unique to each person, and they used those powers combined with technology from the ship to subdue the various hostile alien species on the planet and achieve a foothold there.  They’ve also got the technology to grow cloned bodies and transfer their consciousness over so they don’t die of old age, although the process doesn’t work if you are already dead.

Rather than explain all this to the colonists and the descendants of their various bodies, the crew spreads the Hindu religion and claim to be various gods.  During the initial desperate fighting this is one thing, but after things calm down there is something of a schism among the “gods” or the First, as they are sometimes called.  One faction believes the time has come to abandon the charade and begin spreading advanced technology to everyone, and are known as Accelerationists.  The other faction, the Deicrats, likes things just fine as they are and since they politically maneuver themselves into running the reincarnation machines there soon aren’t any Accelerationists left.

Except Sam.

The book itself is extremely vague in these specifics and has one of the strangest structures of any book that I can recall reading.  The first couple of chapters and the last ones are the only ones that occur in the “present”.  It kicks off right in medias res and doesn’t bother to explain a whole lot, with Lord Yama, the god of death, figuring out how to rescue Sam’s spirit from the planet’s Van Allen radiation belt where it’s been trapped for a while and to stick it back into a body.  At that point Sam decides he needs to meditate for a while, and he thinks about his war with the gods and how he got into that state in the first place.  This recollection takes by far the majority of the book, and when he’s done he gets back up, we get the final battle, and then it wraps up amazingly quickly.

Since the book starts toward the end of the action, as it were, you know that certain things are bound to happen and the only question is why.  For instance, we’re introduced to Yama helping Sam out, but they clearly weren’t always allies, and we get to see a couple of occasions where Yama was either sent to assassinate Sam or was helping some other gods try to kill him.  Tak wasn’t always in the body of an ape, and so on.

Sam’s revolt against the gods takes place over centuries and is a bizarrely interesting struggle.  He’s got some supernormal powers of his own, which helps, but primarily he has his strong will and sense of moral righteousness.  I like characters like this, although he is pretty terrifying as well.  Early on he commits to doing whatever is necessary to break the reign of the gods, and keeps his word to do it, even when he could quit, even when he might die.  If he has to kill, he'll do it, and if he has to make a pact with the aliens he previously trapped, he'll do it, and if he has to deal with the gods themselves, he'll do even that.

In some ways this is a pretty ahead of its time book, but in other ways it does jar a little bit.  Unusually for the time period, it’s got some strong female characters, some of which are helpful to Sam, and some of which are actually primary antagonists.  Its portrayal of same-sex attraction is pretty unfortunate, though.  It was the 60s, and the typical portrayal in SF was characters like the depraved Baron Harkonnen at the time, so even that isn’t as bad as it could be (although the suggestion that lesbians would really prefer to incarnate in musclebound male bodies is pretty silly to a modern reader).

This is also a book that rewards re-reading, since so much of it is in flashbacks and reminiscences.  The first time I read it I was enthralled, and on each subsequent reading I’ve picked up on something that I’d missed previously, and it will probably still be part of the SF canon after many of its contemporaries are not.

Dodger by Terry Pratchett

I’ve been trying to get my thoughts appropriately in order on this one for a while, but every draft that I have been writing so far has ended up damning it with faint praise, when what I guess I’m really trying to do is praise it with faint damns.  So I will go ahead and do that.

Let me start off by saying that this is a quality effort from Pratchett, which means that it’s going to be a reasonable read in any event.  If I’d written this book I’d consider it a job well done.  But considering his unfathomably large and deep catalog, he’s got a lot of competition from himself and I’d put this one in the “below average” category for him.  I ended up reading it on an airplane which is probably about the best place for it, since it was about airplane ride length and it also blocked me from having any other reading options handy without retrieving my carry-on from the overhead bin.  I realize that “better than fooling around with luggage on a packed flight” is not a ringing endorsement.

I’m not entirely sure on this point, but I think this book is probably meant for younger readers and it’s also not a Discworld book.  However, it takes place in Victorian-era London, which is probably about as close to Ankh-Morpork as you’re going to get in something close to the real world.  It’s not a sanitized version of London, there is a bunch of grinding poverty and casual daily horror that is usually elided from the setting.  As to when it takes place . . . well, the book is a little cagey on that and explicitly notes that there’s a form of time compression going on to ensure the cast of characters (some real, some fictional) can all co-exist.  Pratchett’s notes say that it’s somewhere between 1837 and 1853, with the caveat that Sir Robert Peel (playing the part of Sam Vimes this evening) didn’t have the job he’s holding in the novel at any point during those real years.  None of that bothered me especially.  In fact, the world building is absolutely first rate.  I’d love to read Pratchett’s underground history of Victorian London, instead of the story that we end up with.

Anyway, we’re introduced to main character Dodger (his nom de guerre; his actual name is of course extremely embarrassing) as he goes about his business of toshing, which means he ambles around in the sewer system seeing if there’s anything worth picking up down there.  Money’s good, objects are also okay as sometimes they’re worth having and sometimes they can be ransomed.  It’s stated that Dodger is not above “finding” things in people’s pockets from time to time either.  This is a storm sewer system, incidentally, not a septic system, although some people have begun using it as such, much to Dodger’s disgust.  Dodger’s an old, experienced and crafty hand at this, having survived it a lot longer than most people do.  He’s seventeen.

On this particular night he runs across two thugs beating up a young woman and leaps to her defense.  The woman, who is going by the name Simplicity, turns out to have a few problems of her own.  Namely she was persuaded to marry a prince from some German state, only it turns out that he didn’t consult his father the king beforehand and is expected to enter into an arranged marriage with someone else.  Suddenly all the witnesses to the marriage have had unfortunate accidents and she decided that maybe returning to her ancestral homeland was a good move.  The principality wants her back and is assuring the British government that no harm will come to her if she returns.  Everyone acknowledges that “no harm” can still encompass a rather large and unfortunate range of treatment.

So, there’s the setup.  If you are thinking, hey, streetwise urban petty criminal by the name of Dodger, that sounds a little familiar, I’d say you get a cookie but the Artful Dodger is wearing his trademark top hat right on the cover illustration so you’ll have to provide your own cookie.  Yes, Charles Dickens is a character in this book and yes, Dodger manages to drop titles for many of Dickens’ novels throughout the story, usually being reminded to stop writing stuff down in case the reader missed it.

That maybe was a little harsh, but there are a couple problems I’ve got with this book which put it in the below average section.

The first one is that he’s got this really great setup and setting and then basically doesn’t do a whole lot with it.  A lot of Pratchett’s heroes tend to be awesome, but in this case Dodger basically doesn’t even break a sweat.  He starts off down there in the sewer and by the end of the month he’s got a Saville Row bespoke suit and is being received at Buckingham Palace.  I never once got the sense that he was in physical danger, that his plans would fail, or that he was ever out of his depth in any way.  There were several good opportunities for this but none was taken.  Dodger can out-think, out-talk, and out-fight everyone right out of the gate.  The Discworld novel this reminds me of most heavily is Soul Music, where the joke is supposed to be that the guy is named “Bud of the Holly”, but that doesn’t actually have much to do with anything.  I’m saying that it’s cool to have Dickens in this book, but he doesn’t actually do anything that couldn’t have been done by someone who wasn’t Dickens, and he doesn’t really seem all that much like the real Dickens anyway.

In the same vein, the story lacks a proper heavy.  The unseen prince and his father are the villains but they’re over on the Continent.  Their agents first hire the aforementioned two thugs through a fixer.  Later the agents discuss whether the fixer is any good and whether they should hire “The Outlander” instead.  This sounds spooky, right?  A good Pratchett psycho villain like Mr. Teatime or Carcer?  Then Dodger is told to watch out – someone’s hired the Outlander.  And then the Outlander is both introduced and dispatched in one scene.  This is a shame, not least of which because what little we do find out about the Outlander means that this could have been a truly classic villain, and because the actual confrontation is the only time that Dodger ever really is at any of a disadvantage even a little bit (although salvation is not that far away).

One of the other problems I’ve got is perhaps specific to me, since I’m an Oliver Twist fan from way back and one played the Artful Dodger in yet another children’s theater production.  If Dickens really did base Oliver Twist on his fictional-real-life meeting with Dodger then both Dodger and Solomon Cohen should have sued his drawers off for libel.  I didn’t mention Cohen yet but he’s Dodger’s landlord/mentor and is as far from Fagin as humanly possible.  In fact he’s not only as cool as Dodger but far more worldly.  I sort of wish the book had been about him, but he’s been everywhere and seen everything and frankly would have probably had even less trouble overcoming adversity than Dodger did.  So maybe that’s not a good idea.  And also Cohen tries to discourage Dodger from pickpocketing.  But anyway, although Oliver Twist is really enjoyable, that was Oliver’s show and there wasn’t really too much suggestion that the Artful Dodger or Fagin were admirable or aspirational in there.  Like I said, maybe this is just me, but I was really bothered that Dodger was supposed to be the Artful Dodger when he really wasn’t, in any way.

And my other major complaint is in the nature of personal relationships.  In Discworld novels, the romantic leads tend toward the fourth-date marriage (Carrot and Angua excepted).  I’ve always thought that this was sort of a throwback to the Victorian-esque setting of the novels.  So here when it seems like Dodger and Simplicity may be getting together that’s not entirely unreasonable . . . except that this is supposedly the real world.  Simplicity’s problems started with her horrible choice of romantic partners and she’s just coming off a physically abusive relationship, and Dodger is a seventeen year old street kid who frequents prostitutes on the bad side of town.  I can foresee some strife in this potential relationship.  Just saying.  I wasn’t rooting for them to get together, although I won’t say whether or not they do.

So, there’s my list of faint damns.  I don’t need those four hours back, exactly, and it’s not actively bad.  Still, not his best, sad to say.

Takeshi Kovacs trilogy by Richard K. Morgan

I mentioned in my review of Neuromancer that it must be really frustrating to achieve your greatest success on your very first time out, because then no matter what you do, some jerk is always going to be comparing your later efforts to your first one and saying that it’s pretty good but . . .  Today, I’m going to be that jerk in discussing the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, which is absolutely one of the best SF works of the past two decades, and at least arguably one of the all-time greats.  Perhaps Morgan will surpass his own work someday, but so far I don’t think he has.  But no one can take this achievement away from him, and in my mind it puts him right up there with anyone you care to name in the field.

These three books – Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, deal with the adventures of Takeshi Kovacs (that’s the Slavic pronunciation, by the way, you uncultured lout).  By any reasonable standard, Kovacs is a huge asshole, and even that is an understatement.  He’s at best an antihero and only then because the people he’s up against are even worse than him.  If you looked at a list of his many crimes you’d see just about everything on there except possibly sexual assaults, although in the second book he does engage in some dubious erotic healing techniques on a woman who’s really in no position to give enthusiastic consent (and in any event, this is probably more related to George MacDonald Fraser’s discovery in his first Flashman novel that rapists make worse protagonists than murderers, rather than Kovacs’ firm ethical standards.)

He’s introduced in the opening of the very first novel having just robbed a biotechnology firm on Harlan’s World, a Podunk colony planet out in the middle of nowhere, and as he and his girlfriend are post-coitally discussing how to dispose of the score they are raided by the police and shot to death.  Incidentally, this was a righteous shoot since the girlfriend took down a few officers with a toxic flechette pistol and Kovacs really was reaching for his gun at the time.

Now generally being killed tends to interrupt one’s social schedule and make it difficult for you to star in an SF trilogy from that point, but in the 25th century as it turns out everyone has a “cortical stack” implanted which holds all memories and personality, and it’s of pretty solid construction.  So while it’s by no means impossible to permanently get rid of somebody by destroying their stack, it’s not going to happen in your ordinary garden variety accident or gunfight.  This technology also makes people somewhat casually dismissive of their bodies, or “sleeves”, as if the flesh wears out or gets destroyed you can always just get a new one from somewhere.  The authorities also don’t bother putting physical bodies in prison, either; they just put your stack on a server somewhere and auction off your body, and when you get out you get whatever derelict they have available.  It also means that it’s reasonable to expect Kovacs to serve every day of the 120 year sentence he draws.

Except that’s not what happens – his digital personality gets freighted to Earth, where he’s reawakened in a pretty nice body and told that he’s being hired out to an absurdly wealthy tycoon as a sort of parole.  The tycoon, Bancroft, has recently been restored from backup after someone destroyed both his stack and his head.  Official verdict:  suicide.  Bancroft doesn’t buy it and asked around to some of his friends, one of whom recommended Kovacs as a nasty dude who could look into the situation, with force if need be.

As it also turns out, Kovacs used to be a UN Envoy, one of an elite group of super soldiers who make even other hardened badasses piss themselves with fear.  They are, essentially, weaponized sociopaths.  Given that anyone can get put into a huge muscleman body grown out of a vat, what distinguishes the Envoys is their mental conditioning.  This includes, but is not limited to:  resection of normal human fight-or-flight responses, eidetic memory, language retention, disregard for social dominance rules, and general fearlessness.  An Envoy has no scruples whatsoever when it comes to mission completion and thinks nothing of killing fellow humans.  They also have whatever powers would be handy when Morgan needs it for the plot, which I’ll give a pass.  Anyway, they’re so scary that upon leaving the Envoy Corps, they’re forbidden to run for political office or hold high corporate positions because of the threat they pose to the average Joe.  Perhaps because of these restrictions, ex-Envoys account for a large portion of the violent crime in the Protectorate.

Like most really good SF, Altered Carbon and its sequels aren’t really so much about the technology itself as it is about making some point about people.  The effect of cortical stack technology has had an alarming and constrictive effect on society.  It’s all well and good to think that it would be great to be backed up in case you have some horrible accident, or get sick, or whatnot.  But what about if Stalin had access to this technology, with off-site backups and an array of new clone bodies to get reincarnated into over and over again?  Or Steve Jobs?  Imagine if there wasn’t any way to climb the career ladder because the CEO and every middle manager on down was immortal.  And imagine if these people were constantly afraid of what they had being taken away – like today, but even more so.  This isn’t a dystopia, exactly, but the UN government is oppressive and heavily captive by powerful corporate interests.  The people with money and power are planning to keep it forever.

Bancroft isn’t really all that bad as these things go, but he’s got Kovacs over a barrel in that if Bancroft is displeased then the parole gets revoked.  The remainder of the novel is very reminiscent of a postwar noir detective story, only unlike in Raymond Chandler’s stories they don’t just knock him out, but actually can kill him in virtual interrogation rooms.  There’s some loopiness, but it all ties together and it’s really great.  Kovacs makes a good hard boiled detective and even the ultimate antagonist is a Chandler-esque figure of organized crime.

It was perhaps inevitable that a sequel got made, but what is really striking about the sequels is how little they have in common with the first novel.  There’s a lot of throwaway details that come back into play (he mentions offhandedly another Harlan’s World Envoy who finally shows up in the third novel) but the genre is totally changed.  If you were expecting another detective romp in the 25th century, Broken Angels is not it.

Kovacs has gone back into military service of a sort, hiring himself out to a mercenary organization on the planet of Sanction IV, currently involved in a nasty civil war.  As an ex-Envoy he’s a desirable recruit, but mentally he doesn’t seem to be that interested in the conflict.  On one side is a corrupt group of UN affiliated, corporate backed status quo defenders, and on the other the rebel Joshua Kemp.  The UN Protectorate isn’t heroic by any stretch of the imagination, but Kemp seems like a neo-Maoist who’s more interested in erecting statues of himself than any real reform and doesn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons on civilian populations.  Kovacs claims at one point that he just signed up with the mercenaries because that gave him the best chance at getting a new body if killed there, and given his numerous allegiance switches this may even be mostly true.

Perhaps I should amend that a little bit – in this book Kovacs is totally out for himself.  He made a noble and selfless gesture at the end of Altered Carbon, but it would be hard to imagine him doing that here.  It may be because he’s older and even more jaded than before, but when he finds that there’s a chance to obtain an alien artifact he immediately ditches his enlistment obligations and attempts to cash in on it.  We already knew that he was a morally questionable individual, but in this book he slides very close into outright villainy, although in thinking about it he was pursuing a career in armed robbery prior to the events of the first novel.  Maybe comic-book level super villainy, then.  Anyway, I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that the actual hero of this book is mercenary chief Isaac Carrera, although it appears to be Morgan’s intent to portray everyone as a huge asshole.

Having made his score and escaped Sanction IV, the third book, Woken Furies, finds Kovacs back home on Harlan’s World engaging in a little recreational murder of some people who have annoyed him.  This one takes a little while longer to get started, but also contains the most interesting antagonist – Kovacs himself.  The ruling class of Harlan’s World surreptitiously took a backup copy of his mental state back when he was younger and still had some loyalty to the governing structure, and have sleeved this younger self in an attempt to get rid of the older Kovacs.  (Double-sleeving yourself in this way is highly illegal, which doesn’t stop it from happening occasionally throughout the novels.)  This one also features the possible return of revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer, who pioneered the concept of multi-generational civil conflict well before Kovacs himself was born.  As it turns out, Kovacs was only on Sanction IV in the first place to provide assistance to Kemp’s revolution on behalf of a Quellist cell before deciding Kemp was a jerk and defecting.

This third book is probably the technically best written of the three, but also tries to get into waters a little too deep.  Morgan writes really good action and suspense scenes but is not quite as good at philosophy and religion, both of which make up a large portion of this one.  But even the characters admit that they’re not sure what they’re proposing is better than the status quo, just that they want to change the power structure to make sure it’s not always concentrating in the hands of those who already have it.

There’s a ton of good world building and detail with just enough handwaving to make it all work.  The whole series is obviously a labor of love, and Morgan keeps it moving so quickly that you don’t have time to worry if any of it really makes sense.

At the end, when Kovacs is going along with a possible new revolution, he’s still not sold on whether it’ll work or whether it’s a good idea.  He’s not an idealist or an ideologue, and most of his capacity for group loyalty ended in a viral strike on most of his squad on a planet called Innenin.  As much as I like these novels, I also really respect Morgan’s decision to stop it here on the grounds that we’ve seen enough.

Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard

Having read the first book in this series and thinking it had potential, I decided to take the plunge and give the sequel a shot.  I’m certainly glad I did, because this proves that Howard’s world building wasn’t a fluke and my intuition that getting Cabal off that train would be the best thing for his character was right.  This book was way fun, and in my opinion better than the first.

Cabal starts off this book in a condemned cell in some made up Eastern European or Baltic state named Mirkavia (in a nice literary nod, Ruritania is said to be one of its close neighbors).  He’s in the condemned cell because he got caught trying to steal a necromantical tome from a local library, and as it turns out, just being a necromancer is a capital offense in that part of this world.  This does seem a little excessive on its face, but keeping in mind that he does actually have magical powers and did in fact originally sell his soul to Satan in order to obtain those powers, and for that matter we’re told that some of his necromantic experiments haven’t gone exactly 100% according to plan, it’s perhaps understandable why the authorities have that reaction.  The account of his trial (he was not given a trial) is pretty funny.  In fact, the whole thing is pretty funny.  The omniscient narrator has broken free of some of the constraints of the first volume and feels free to tell the reader repeatedly what a dick Cabal is and outline his alien mental states, generally in a very entertaining manner.

Anyway, Cabal is approached by a sleazy nobleman with a proposition; the Mirkavian emperor was supposed to give a rousing speech but has unfortunately just died.  Since the powers that be really need the speech given, and given Cabal’s specialty, they want to know if maybe Cabal can make the emperor less dead for a while.  Although it gives him a stay of execution, neither he nor the noblemen really believe it’s a reprieve, although Cabal does manage to use his freedom to make his former jailers shave a large number of cats.  It’s only a matter of time before he manages to outwit his ostensible captors and escape, of course.

We learned at the conclusion of the first novel that Cabal is doing all this stuff because his fiancée died and he wants to restore her to life.  Not some shambling semblance of life, but the real thing.  What the dead fiancée thinks about this proposition isn’t clear, and it’s also not clear whether she’d actually approve of everything he’s been up to in his quest.  It’s symptomatic of Cabal’s character that he considers the death something of a personal affront to him, as opposed to a general tragedy.  As the narrator points out, Cabal’s goals are sympathetic if you overlook the way he treats people, the things that he does, and his general methods.  But he’s got style, and having secured the book he came to Mirkavia to obtain he’s now got to figure out how to get out of the country, which he does by drugging some civil servant who looks vaguely like him with a chemical that isn’t all that likely to kill him, and taking his place on a steampunk airship out of the country.

This is the longest section of the book and also where the “Detective” part comes in.  Cabal is only moderately interested in legalities (he’s usually aware that he is breaking the law when he does it, but never lets that stop him if he feels that his activities will be unduly constrained) but has an extremely strong sense of self-preservation, so when there are a series of shady occurrences onboard, he’s got to see if he can get to the bottom of events.  He’s certainly not out for truth or justice, he’s in it to save his own ass.

If the conceit of the first novel was to explore where exactly a diabolical carnival would come from in the first place, this one is a Victorian era locked room mystery where everyone involved has some sort of secret and they’re on a magitek airship, where the detective is an amoral sociopath.  Cabal’s interests basically begin, end, and move through determining whether there’s a threat to him and, if so, removing it, while not letting slip that he’s an infamous necromancer and fugitive.  Other passengers have their own agendas, from trying to get an army contract to sell pork rinds to smuggling to racking up sexual conquests.  I tried to think of a passenger who didn’t have an ulterior motive or a secret identity and eventually came up with two.  It’s that kind of story.

Also on board the airship is one Leonie Barrow, who (if you read the first novel) sold her soul to Cabal in order to save her father, but in the end didn’t have to go to Hell for various reasons, only very tangentially because Cabal felt somewhat bad about it and more because Cabal was one soul short anyway.  Obviously Barrow could blow Cabal’s cover any time she wanted, and it would make some sense for Cabal to surreptitiously “remove” her.  He doesn’t, and can’t for the life of him really explain why, although her resemblance to his dead love probably is a major factor in there somewhere.  On her part, it would make sense to rat him out, and she can’t for the life of her really explain why she doesn’t.  Not that this is a romance, mind you.  It’s not that kind of story, and Cabal probably wouldn’t be interested, even if someone were to explain romance to him, which they don’t.  It’s implied that having no soul, then being re-souled and having so long a period of obsessive devotion to his goals have done something to his ability to feel much of anything anymore, which makes some sense.

Howard really has a lot of fun playing with literary and genre conventions of a typical detective story, and manages at the same time to tell a really good one.  He plays fair with clues and the astute reader might figure it out before Cabal does.  (For the record and in all honesty, I whiffed big time.)  I like detective stories generally, I like dry wit, and I found Cabal’s responses to all the indignities that life throws out him to be very funny indeed.  I also admire sequels that have dramatic genre shifts while maintaining the same overall tone.  So really, this one was hitting on all cylinders for me.

There’s a third book in the series, available currently only in the UK, and apparently a fourth on the way.  With this level of quality and improvement, I’m looking forward to their trans-Atlantic appearances.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

Jonathan L. Howard is an experienced hand in the video game industry who I was not previously aware of and whose previous literary output consisted of a couple of short stories which I’ve never read and had also never heard of.  Thus it is perhaps surprising that this novel is so good; it also doesn’t overstay its welcome, thereby hitting two for two.  Perfection?  Not really, read on.

Let’s start out by noting that Johannes Cabal is a complete dick right from the very first page, where he’s introduced entering Hell in order to make a deal with Satan.  This is of course a somewhat clichéd scenario and requires something a little different to make it in any way interesting, but Howard provides this by quickly establishing that Cabal is actually trying to get his soul back, as he sold it to Satan already some years ago.  This introduces the character as someone who’s got the sort of brass stones to demand his soul back from the devil, but oblivious and entitled enough to expect to actually get it.  In fact he’s downright churlish at Satan’s obstinacy in refusing to turn it back over right away, especially since he doesn’t propose to return the necromantic powers he obtained for selling it in the first place.  Apparently the soul was actually removed from Cabal’s body at the time of the original deal and has been in Hell this whole time; how exactly this works is not really explained, nor should it be in my opinion.  Johannes wants the soul back because its absence is rendering his experiments unreliable, and as a man of science this will never do.

Anyhow, Satan does always like a challenge, so he makes a second deal with Cabal.  He’s got to get 100 suckers to sell their souls within the next year, and then he’ll get his own back.  If he fails, Satan gets to kill him.  Satan also gives him a certain amount of evil mojo and access to a demonic carnival train to use as an attraction, since Johannes isn’t very good at using persuasion.  Well, non-lethal persuasion.

I don’t really need to point out that someone who would even consider getting 100 people to accept damnation to save their own ass is a pretty horrible, but Johannes doesn’t really seem to understand why anyone would consider it, you know, a thing.  He’s not like those other people, he’s important, he’s got some stuff he wants to do.  And by the end of the book you can at least see where he’s coming from, even if he is still totally unjustified in pretty much every action he takes.  Making a protagonist this loathsome and unlikable still worth reading about would be a challenge for anyone, and Howard steps right up to it, mostly by contrasting him with his brother Horst, currently suffering from a case of vampirism that is also Johannes’ fault.

In case it’s not clear, this is actually a very funny book, punctuated with the darkest of dark comedy.  Johannes’ sociopathy and his aura of assholism is played for laughs early and often, and you laugh at him more than with him (seeing as how he probably doesn’t ever laugh, this isn’t too hard).  Of course you wouldn’t want to laugh at him to his face because he’d kill you with his revolver and animate your corpse.  Well, maybe not on the first offence, but he’d certainly think about it.

Despite being almost totally distinct from it in every way, reading this book reminded me of nothing more than one of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels.  The protagonist is a total self-serving bastard with no traditional redeeming qualities whatsoever, and furthermore he doesn’t care what you think about it.  Therefore, you’re just reading it to admire their personal style and maybe see them foil someone even worse than they are, in Parker’s case other horrible criminals, in this case, Satan.  And whatever else you might say about him, Johannes Cabal has style.  Insufferable, annoying, highly threatening and morally dubious style to be sure, but style it is.

Now all that said, even with the book being quite reasonable in length, I at least was ready for it to be over with, as I felt that the premise had quite exhausted its lease.  In the afterward, Howard mentioned that he basically got the idea for this book by wondering where the demonic carnival in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes could have originated.  Johannes Cabal, however, is almost too awesome to have confined him to this train.  At the same time, he’s also such a repulsive person that you don’t really care if he does lose his bet.  He might have made a better recurring unbeatable foil in a book series starring Horst, actually.  Nonetheless, this has a lot of potential, and I’d give it a recommend to the non-squeamish who love some dry British humor.