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This was Ultraviolent and Porny cyberpunk on the High Frontier. Morgan rotely follows the formula of his popular, Altered Carbon series with its cyberwarrior Takeshi Kovacs. The new cyberwarrior was ex-corporate enforcer Hakan Veil and the venue was exclusively a colonized Mars. I dimly remember reading the Altered Carbon books, although the TV series is fresh in my mind. This story (I’m betting it’s to be a series) was just an OtT and overly long version of that series’ well-worn dystopian science fiction troupes. Some folks may consider it dark and gritty. I thought it verged on rubbish. However, the story was not complete drivel. World building—always a strong suite for the author had a few brilliant moments. In summary, this book was amphetamine laced old wine in a new bottle.
My dead tree copy was an overly long 400-pages. Some of these pages went quickly; others were eye-rolling agony. I suspect Morgan was getting paid by the word—there were a lot more pages than there needed to be.
Prose was good. Morgan has been writing for some time. My copy was written in Brit-speak, and had not been Americanized. I thought this added a certain charm. Both dialogue and description are well done and rich. Morgan has a style. There was a definite attempt at a [a:Raymond Chandler|1377|Raymond Chandler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1206535318p2/1377.jpg]-esque use of metaphors and similes. In addition, he had a fondness for using cumulative adjectives. I liked the elements of invented Martian vocabulary. The use of a "cyberpunk-ish" adjective or noun is also characteristic.
At first, I found this baroque prose interesting. However, by page-300 it was making me weary. The prose contained a liberal use of profanity and vulgarities. Considering a lot of scenes contained conversations with denizens of the demimonde, this made the story appropriately realistic to me. However, there was a notable absence of ethnic slurs, which I would have expected.
Action scenes, of which there were many, were well done. Perhaps Veil's many-against-one victories and one-shot kills were a tad too first-person-shooter like?
I was really annoyed by Morgan’s use of the unreliable narrator technique. There is something unfair to re-quote dialog from earlier in the story—changing it to affect the plot.
The story contained sex, drugs and violence. The sex was graphic. Oddly, it was all heteronormative, although other practices and preferences were discussed. (I thought this was a bit prudish.) Morgan was unsuccessful in holding my attention with his sex-related descriptive prose. I found myself paging through these detailed tumescent and lubricious passages. Less is more. Substance abuse including alcohol was endemic in the story. Drugs were both futuristic and mundane. I note that alcohol usage among the characters was at the high-levels typical of noir stories. Violence was graphic and included torture. It was: edged weapons, physical and firearms usage. There were vivid descriptions of blood, gore and major trauma. Body count was genocidal.
The protagonist was Hakon Veil. His POV was used throughout. He’s a Terminator-like corporate mercenary called an “Overrider”. He's somewhat augmented with an embedded AI for comic relief and deus ex machina duty. He’s a riff on Takeshi Kovacs who also plays the traditional noir PI role. He's more of a hard man than Philip Marlowe ever was, but had a similar, highly developed patter. I preferred Kovacs to Veil, although Veil was irresistible to women. The fem fatale was Madison Madekwe. She’s an Earth functionary. Veil was coerced into being her bodyguard on Mars. There were a plethora (a word I hate BTW) of antagonists. They arrive at different times and with different efficacy. In general, I felt the bad guys who were not red shirts were poorly developed and their arrival ill-timed considering their role in the story. Other characters in the story are riffs on an extended list of noir arch-types, many of them from the demimonde. The Mars demimonde was a mashup of the noir-ish late 20th Century LA demimonde and the American Wild West. All are well rendered with enough variation to be both familiar and interesting. They included: diplomats, gangsters, club owners, spies, bent politicians, rich men, entertainers, activists, bent cops, hookers, hangers-on, con artists, journalists, mercenaries, AIs and cyborgs.
It’s a gangland, local government corruption, corporate government corruption, and political coup on Mars story. Plot was a partial interleaving of two sub-plots. There's a woman who needs to be protected and a local government cover-up in progress. The two sub-plots morph into an incongruously larger coup plot after a confusing number of crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses(!). Characters are conjured out of the ether to support plot zigs and zags. There were also a large number of flashbacks to Veil’s past for background. I didn't find all of them to be necessary.
World building was this story’s strongest suite. It’s substantially Bladerunner-esque. Colonial Mars was originally an Australia-like penal colony. Now it’s a free and productive member of the Solar system with felonious tendencies. Morgan’s Cradle City location looks and feels an awful lot like a rustic version of Chandler's Bay City where Philp Marlowe spent so much time. The Bradbury location was obviously the Martian 'Los Angeles'. Morgan embellishes his world with both strange and familiar titillating details. Fucktronics, Running-hot, Insulene™, COLIN, Blond Viasutis, BMW, Heckler & Koch, etc. decorate his ultraviolent cyberpunk with corporate branding. For example, Veil was a fan of Laphroaig an expensive import from Earth, but drank Mars Mark™ on his own dime. The greatest majority of the tech is credible. Computer and biological tech was a little flashy, but likely. Use of Makers (3D printers), tech not yet mainstreamed when Altered Carbon was written, was good. High altitude Andean and Himalayan immigration's affect to the 'thin air' melting pot of Mars was a nice touch. However, I thought the effect of Mars perihelion and aphelion on communications to Earth received some hand waving. I'm also not sure about how the described Martian (animal) wildlife could exist in such a marginal ecosystem.
In the end, Morgan’s dystopia didn’t ring true to me. I frankly couldn’t see how his Mars economy could work. The Martian population felt overly large for the state-of-development. The cost of Security with so many people thieving and pirating from each other armed with readily available high-powered weapons, including spaceship-to-spaceship ordinance would have been prohibitive. So much productive capacity (space ships, fabrication plants, commercial laboratories) gets blown-up in the general lawlessness of Morgan’s Martian dystopia, that no sane business manager would likely risk an investment in that environment.
Traditional cyberpunk is a high-tech riff on the genres of hardboiled and noir. Morgan has been making a living off of writing a more graphic version of cyberpunk with emphasis on carnage, sex, and substance abuse for years. This story was chock-full of gratuitous: sex, violence and substance abuse, which didn’t really titillate me. I suppose I'm not the laddish audience the author was targeting? It was also 100-pages too long. This includes all the flashbacks to fill-in Veil’s background. Veil’s snappy badinage and the author's use of metaphors and similes eventually felt like ‘filler’, although the thinning atmosphere of the story kept me reading. Where I really hung up on this story was that the zeitgeist of Morgan’s Mars couldn’t support a technologically, sophisticated society. Why build anything, if all authority is corrupt, and folks can easily steal anything of value you own or kill you? Finally, this story was too much like Altered Carbon. You’d think the author could come-up with something different?
My dead tree copy was an overly long 400-pages. Some of these pages went quickly; others were eye-rolling agony. I suspect Morgan was getting paid by the word—there were a lot more pages than there needed to be.
Prose was good. Morgan has been writing for some time. My copy was written in Brit-speak, and had not been Americanized. I thought this added a certain charm. Both dialogue and description are well done and rich. Morgan has a style. There was a definite attempt at a [a:Raymond Chandler|1377|Raymond Chandler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1206535318p2/1377.jpg]-esque use of metaphors and similes. In addition, he had a fondness for using cumulative adjectives. I liked the elements of invented Martian vocabulary. The use of a "cyberpunk-ish" adjective or noun is also characteristic.
And across the drizzling sky, the first of the ‘branegels spread their almost invisible soap-bubble wings. Silver flurries of preliminary static shivered down their surfaces, like coughing to clear your throat.
At first, I found this baroque prose interesting. However, by page-300 it was making me weary. The prose contained a liberal use of profanity and vulgarities. Considering a lot of scenes contained conversations with denizens of the demimonde, this made the story appropriately realistic to me. However, there was a notable absence of ethnic slurs, which I would have expected.
Action scenes, of which there were many, were well done. Perhaps Veil's many-against-one victories and one-shot kills were a tad too first-person-shooter like?
I was really annoyed by Morgan’s use of the unreliable narrator technique. There is something unfair to re-quote dialog from earlier in the story—changing it to affect the plot.
The story contained sex, drugs and violence. The sex was graphic. Oddly, it was all heteronormative, although other practices and preferences were discussed. (I thought this was a bit prudish.) Morgan was unsuccessful in holding my attention with his sex-related descriptive prose. I found myself paging through these detailed tumescent and lubricious passages. Less is more. Substance abuse including alcohol was endemic in the story. Drugs were both futuristic and mundane. I note that alcohol usage among the characters was at the high-levels typical of noir stories. Violence was graphic and included torture. It was: edged weapons, physical and firearms usage. There were vivid descriptions of blood, gore and major trauma. Body count was genocidal.
The protagonist was Hakon Veil. His POV was used throughout. He’s a Terminator-like corporate mercenary called an “Overrider”. He's somewhat augmented with an embedded AI for comic relief and deus ex machina duty. He’s a riff on Takeshi Kovacs who also plays the traditional noir PI role. He's more of a hard man than Philip Marlowe ever was, but had a similar, highly developed patter. I preferred Kovacs to Veil, although Veil was irresistible to women. The fem fatale was Madison Madekwe. She’s an Earth functionary. Veil was coerced into being her bodyguard on Mars. There were a plethora (a word I hate BTW) of antagonists. They arrive at different times and with different efficacy. In general, I felt the bad guys who were not red shirts were poorly developed and their arrival ill-timed considering their role in the story. Other characters in the story are riffs on an extended list of noir arch-types, many of them from the demimonde. The Mars demimonde was a mashup of the noir-ish late 20th Century LA demimonde and the American Wild West. All are well rendered with enough variation to be both familiar and interesting. They included: diplomats, gangsters, club owners, spies, bent politicians, rich men, entertainers, activists, bent cops, hookers, hangers-on, con artists, journalists, mercenaries, AIs and cyborgs.
It’s a gangland, local government corruption, corporate government corruption, and political coup on Mars story. Plot was a partial interleaving of two sub-plots. There's a woman who needs to be protected and a local government cover-up in progress. The two sub-plots morph into an incongruously larger coup plot after a confusing number of crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses(!). Characters are conjured out of the ether to support plot zigs and zags. There were also a large number of flashbacks to Veil’s past for background. I didn't find all of them to be necessary.
World building was this story’s strongest suite. It’s substantially Bladerunner-esque. Colonial Mars was originally an Australia-like penal colony. Now it’s a free and productive member of the Solar system with felonious tendencies. Morgan’s Cradle City location looks and feels an awful lot like a rustic version of Chandler's Bay City where Philp Marlowe spent so much time. The Bradbury location was obviously the Martian 'Los Angeles'. Morgan embellishes his world with both strange and familiar titillating details. Fucktronics, Running-hot, Insulene™, COLIN, Blond Viasutis, BMW, Heckler & Koch, etc. decorate his ultraviolent cyberpunk with corporate branding. For example, Veil was a fan of Laphroaig an expensive import from Earth, but drank Mars Mark™ on his own dime. The greatest majority of the tech is credible. Computer and biological tech was a little flashy, but likely. Use of Makers (3D printers), tech not yet mainstreamed when Altered Carbon was written, was good. High altitude Andean and Himalayan immigration's affect to the 'thin air' melting pot of Mars was a nice touch. However, I thought the effect of Mars perihelion and aphelion on communications to Earth received some hand waving. I'm also not sure about how the described Martian (animal) wildlife could exist in such a marginal ecosystem.
In the end, Morgan’s dystopia didn’t ring true to me. I frankly couldn’t see how his Mars economy could work. The Martian population felt overly large for the state-of-development. The cost of Security with so many people thieving and pirating from each other armed with readily available high-powered weapons, including spaceship-to-spaceship ordinance would have been prohibitive. So much productive capacity (space ships, fabrication plants, commercial laboratories) gets blown-up in the general lawlessness of Morgan’s Martian dystopia, that no sane business manager would likely risk an investment in that environment.
Traditional cyberpunk is a high-tech riff on the genres of hardboiled and noir. Morgan has been making a living off of writing a more graphic version of cyberpunk with emphasis on carnage, sex, and substance abuse for years. This story was chock-full of gratuitous: sex, violence and substance abuse, which didn’t really titillate me. I suppose I'm not the laddish audience the author was targeting? It was also 100-pages too long. This includes all the flashbacks to fill-in Veil’s background. Veil’s snappy badinage and the author's use of metaphors and similes eventually felt like ‘filler’, although the thinning atmosphere of the story kept me reading. Where I really hung up on this story was that the zeitgeist of Morgan’s Mars couldn’t support a technologically, sophisticated society. Why build anything, if all authority is corrupt, and folks can easily steal anything of value you own or kill you? Finally, this story was too much like Altered Carbon. You’d think the author could come-up with something different?