Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

I loved Richard Morgan's first novel "Altered Carbon", and this is the sequel. In the first book, Kovacs has been trained to be an Envoy, an elite government soldier who discovers that the only retirement job is crime. He lives in a future where your mind and personality are routinel;y accurately recorded on an Altered Carbon chip embedded at the base of your brain. The chip can be extracted at death, and then implanted in a forced-grown clone adult body so that you can live again.

Kovacs has been caught, his data extracted, and squirted as information faster than light from his colony homeworld to Earth. Convicts are no longer kept imprisoned in the expensive flesh, instead their chips are removed and kept in a Stack. Kovacs is taken off the stack to become a bonded private detective and solve a murder in "Altered Carbon".

"Broken Angels" takes up Kovacs' career afterwards, and he's returned to the military as a mercenary. His edge over everyone else is his Envoy conditioning and training. This is another story where Zen enlightenment has been adavnced by science into a useuable technology. Not so far-fetched when New Scientist is running stories about how the brain scans of Zen masters are different than average and where they can see in the neurology how Zen practices can make a person feel more inner peace and control. Kovacs can control his emotions and his perceptions utterly, he's always cool. He has skills and reflexes that can transfer over to an unfamiliar body in unfamiliar environments.

Kovacs has been "sleeved", re-embodied, in a war zone to recover an alien artefact before the other side do so. Human life is cheap among mercenaries, but in Kovacs' case, he goes to a market to buy soldiers mind chips, recovered from their battlefield corpses. He's cheerfully served by a man who scoops chips out of a huge pile and charges by the kilogram. Soldier's minds are booted up in a virtual environment, where the recruitment officer asks them if they want to sign up. Since the alternative is death, its an offer that can't be refused.

This is a very different book to the previous one, it was a big jump for me from private detective muder mystery to military campaign, and so I don't know if the feeling I had that we took too long to get to the artefact was because of the change of pace in the switch in sub-genres, or was just my impatience. I love the character and the writing, but the second book wasn't quite the pure joy of "Altered Carbon".

Richard Morgan has a wonderful writing style, and he keeps coming up with further and further implications of his basic world set-up and technology. Kovacs is a punk who doesn't deserve the Zen enlightenment his Envoy conditioning has gifted him, and is enlightened enough to know so. His character grows throughout the two books, and I'll be very interested to see where Morgan has him going next.