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wintermute47 's review for:
Thin Air
by Richard K. Morgan
I'm a big fan of Richard K. Morgan's science fiction. I reread his Takeshi Kovacs trilogy every handful of years, and 'Market Forces' is a dark, nasty thrill ride that I only appreciated more once I took a job in corporate America. So when I learned that he was working on another sci-fi novel after a long break, I was eager to get my hands on a copy. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is one I'm likely to revisit.
Part of the problem is the main character. Hakan Veil is both a "hibernoid" and an "overrider:" in the early phase of the book, these terms are used frequently without being defined, but it is eventually explained the Veil was genetically modified as a young age to be capable of spending extended periods in cryogenic hibernation ("hibernoid") with the purpose of placing him on long-haul spaceships where he can be awoken to retake a ship on which the crew mutinies ("overrider"). As a result of his genetic alternations, Veil spends four months out of every year in hibernation, and when he wakes up, he's amped for extreme aggression and superhuman physical activity.
But, if you want someone who can hibernate indefinitely but wake up immediately ready for action, does it necessarily follow that he'd have long periods of required hibernation? The two concepts don't entirely align, and moreover, there doesn't seem to be a really good reason for this aspect of character identity. We never seen Veil being anything other than brutal, so it's not like his condition alters his behavior or personality appreciably. Nor does the need for prolonged sleep meaningfully change his motivations. It's mentioned early on that he needs to earn enough money during his active periods to sustain him during his annual hibernation, but on the time scale of the novel this never feels like a truly motivating factor: there's no sense of a ticking clock, or that Veil is coming up against a hard limit of his own biology. It would have made for an interesting plot device, but as it stands, it doesn't add much except for the opportunity for some confusing terminology.
On the topic of unnecessary elements, the secondary characters in this novel all felt half-developed. Veil seems to have a love-hate relationship with all of the women around him, from the angry lady cop to the hooker with a heart of gold to the bitter failed revolutionary to the icy lady gangster. None of them are fully realized, and although they all serve a plot purpose, it feels very repetitive. Morgan HAS written well-defined, interested female characters before, so I don't know what happened here.
The rot eats into the plotting, as well. Morgan tends to throw the reader into the story immediately without a lot of handholding or orientation. This makes for a challenging few early chapters, but it's a valid stylistic decision. In this novel, however, major plot evolutions come out of nowhere. On two different occasions Veil double-crosses someone without warning to the reader. In both cases it's more or less justified retrospectively, but the feeling is less that Veil is making decisions motivated by his values and more that he's bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Additionally, Veil's biotechnological enhancements serve as a recurrent deus ex machina--they allow him to bust out of restraints to escape torture, to shrug off shotgun blasts to the spine, and to generally do whatever the plot needs him to do at any given moment. It short circuits the tension of story, and it feels like a really amateurish mistake for the author to make.
I didn't hate it--it was interesting enough, and presented some neat concepts, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped for from the guy who wrote 'Altered Carbon.' Hopefully now that he's knocked the dust off he'll be back in form.
Part of the problem is the main character. Hakan Veil is both a "hibernoid" and an "overrider:" in the early phase of the book, these terms are used frequently without being defined, but it is eventually explained the Veil was genetically modified as a young age to be capable of spending extended periods in cryogenic hibernation ("hibernoid") with the purpose of placing him on long-haul spaceships where he can be awoken to retake a ship on which the crew mutinies ("overrider"). As a result of his genetic alternations, Veil spends four months out of every year in hibernation, and when he wakes up, he's amped for extreme aggression and superhuman physical activity.
But, if you want someone who can hibernate indefinitely but wake up immediately ready for action, does it necessarily follow that he'd have long periods of required hibernation? The two concepts don't entirely align, and moreover, there doesn't seem to be a really good reason for this aspect of character identity. We never seen Veil being anything other than brutal, so it's not like his condition alters his behavior or personality appreciably. Nor does the need for prolonged sleep meaningfully change his motivations. It's mentioned early on that he needs to earn enough money during his active periods to sustain him during his annual hibernation, but on the time scale of the novel this never feels like a truly motivating factor: there's no sense of a ticking clock, or that Veil is coming up against a hard limit of his own biology. It would have made for an interesting plot device, but as it stands, it doesn't add much except for the opportunity for some confusing terminology.
On the topic of unnecessary elements, the secondary characters in this novel all felt half-developed. Veil seems to have a love-hate relationship with all of the women around him, from the angry lady cop to the hooker with a heart of gold to the bitter failed revolutionary to the icy lady gangster. None of them are fully realized, and although they all serve a plot purpose, it feels very repetitive. Morgan HAS written well-defined, interested female characters before, so I don't know what happened here.
The rot eats into the plotting, as well. Morgan tends to throw the reader into the story immediately without a lot of handholding or orientation. This makes for a challenging few early chapters, but it's a valid stylistic decision. In this novel, however, major plot evolutions come out of nowhere. On two different occasions Veil double-crosses someone without warning to the reader. In both cases it's more or less justified retrospectively, but the feeling is less that Veil is making decisions motivated by his values and more that he's bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Additionally, Veil's biotechnological enhancements serve as a recurrent deus ex machina--they allow him to bust out of restraints to escape torture, to shrug off shotgun blasts to the spine, and to generally do whatever the plot needs him to do at any given moment. It short circuits the tension of story, and it feels like a really amateurish mistake for the author to make.
I didn't hate it--it was interesting enough, and presented some neat concepts, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped for from the guy who wrote 'Altered Carbon.' Hopefully now that he's knocked the dust off he'll be back in form.