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DID NOT FINISH: 42%
Painfully slow. I've read any enjoyed all of Richard Morgan's books (Market Forces maybe less so)... this one is just bad.
Veil is the same main character from all of his other books without any of the interesting features. There's none of Kovacs' mental acuity, agelessness, and Envoy training, thanks to the core sleeving concept. None of Carl and Ringil's seething anger at being the target of prejudice. There's no sense that he might be have a strong moral code but there's darkness inbuilt into him - he's explicitly genetically wired to be violent and unlikeable, and rather than using that to create tension as Morgan did with Carl in Thirteen, he just uses it as an excuse to lay out the same old alpha male tropes without any kind of the interesting counterpoint.
Morgan's world building and description is always fantastic, but the 200 pages I read went on and on and on with description of Mars and explanation of yet more tech. We're in exposition central here. Veil is more lecturer than enforcer. Outside of that we've got heaps on heaps of paper thin character models, and violence that I didn't care enough about to find interesting. One of the things I love most about Morgan's other work are the terrifying implications of what technology can be (e.g. ways to 'misuse' stacks) but I didn't see any of that here.
If I cared about the characters then maybe I'd be interesting in the action scenes, but they boil down to Veil shooting people as if he's switched on the VATS system from Fallout 3 and gone into an invulnerable cutscene... and then having some 'witty' repartee that displays how unlikeable he is and how the NPCs he's shot have no personality. Kovacs' Envoy reflexes/calculated violence and Ringil's supernatural sword skill this is not.
The plot hadn't started by the point I gave up. Altered Carbon and Thirteen hook you in with a mystery. Here, it's just Veil being a thug for a variety of people, with the main thread apparently being a bodyguard for an auditor (but not really). Given Veil is not likeable or interesting in any way and the action is a step too far past suspension of disbelief, I needed a plot to keep me going.
Veil is the same main character from all of his other books without any of the interesting features. There's none of Kovacs' mental acuity, agelessness, and Envoy training, thanks to the core sleeving concept. None of Carl and Ringil's seething anger at being the target of prejudice. There's no sense that he might be have a strong moral code but there's darkness inbuilt into him - he's explicitly genetically wired to be violent and unlikeable, and rather than using that to create tension as Morgan did with Carl in Thirteen, he just uses it as an excuse to lay out the same old alpha male tropes without any kind of the interesting counterpoint.
Morgan's world building and description is always fantastic, but the 200 pages I read went on and on and on with description of Mars and explanation of yet more tech. We're in exposition central here. Veil is more lecturer than enforcer. Outside of that we've got heaps on heaps of paper thin character models, and violence that I didn't care enough about to find interesting. One of the things I love most about Morgan's other work are the terrifying implications of what technology can be (e.g. ways to 'misuse' stacks) but I didn't see any of that here.
If I cared about the characters then maybe I'd be interesting in the action scenes, but they boil down to Veil shooting people as if he's switched on the VATS system from Fallout 3 and gone into an invulnerable cutscene... and then having some 'witty' repartee that displays how unlikeable he is and how the NPCs he's shot have no personality. Kovacs' Envoy reflexes/calculated violence and Ringil's supernatural sword skill this is not.
The plot hadn't started by the point I gave up. Altered Carbon and Thirteen hook you in with a mystery. Here, it's just Veil being a thug for a variety of people, with the main thread apparently being a bodyguard for an auditor (but not really). Given Veil is not likeable or interesting in any way and the action is a step too far past suspension of disbelief, I needed a plot to keep me going.