The Core Dump

Woken Furies is the third installment in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs saga, and according to Richard Morgan it will be last. If this is so, the series goes out with a bang, bringing together a lot of the world building hints Morgan has strewn around in the first two novels, Altered Carbon, and Broken Angels.

A brilliant mesh of cyberpunk and noir, this is one of the best novels I’ve read this year—smart, ferocious, and with a tight plot, it is one intense ride.

While Woken Furies can be read as a stand-alone, it is much more fulfilling if you’ve read the previous two installments.

Get on board the Kovacs train. You won’t be disappointed.

Read more Core Dump Richard Morgan reviews.

Released in 1986, Walter Jon Williams’s Hardwired is one of the classics of proto-cyberpunk—a gritty and raucous machine set in a version of the standard 80s future dystopia of hackers and outlaws. With high energy, a fairly character-driven plot, and cool tech, it’s very much worth a revisit.

My daughter: Budding artist or normal three-year-old?

Click for larger version.

Hey, somebody has to tag the Nexus 6 models when they come here.

Soundtrack: “Turn Up The Night” by Black Sabbath

With Market Forces, Richard Morgan moves away from the far-future trappings of his Takeshi Kovacs novels and instead delivers a more “traditional” cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian near-future where most nation states have collapsed and their functions have been subsumed by corporations.

Market Forces suffers a lot from the somewhat silly premise that the way to rise through the ranks of the corporations is by war driving, having duels on roads that are mostly empty since only “zek tivs” have the money to buy gasoline. But if you can swallow that, as well as the heavy-handed polemic that crops up, the portrait of Chris Faulkner, our protagonist, is deftly painted and surprisingly rich.

While highly readable and tightly plotted, Market Forces feels like a novelization of a graphic novel with a focus on visually interesting scenes. That being said, if you like the genre the novel is well worth a read, and provides a snack while we wait for the next Takeshi Kovacs saga.

I’ve lamented in the past how we don’t seem to be getting any closer to interesting cyberpunk tech, but two items in today’s news point to some activity:

Item The First:

Troops in Iraq will soon be shooting an experimental weapon that fires an invisible beam of energy instead of bullets to repel insurgents without killing civilians.

The idea is that the Active Denial System (ADS) penetrates the skin “to create a severe non-lethal burning sensation.” According to testing, the beam does not cause any lasting damage. Except perhaps for the memory of being burned alive.

While the idea seems good in that it can help avoid civilian casualties in high-stress environments like road blocks, a cynic might say that this kind of weapon has the potential for being used in a bit of an indiscriminate manner.

Item The Second:

Police in Mesa, Arizona have purchased the Mobile Plate Hunter 900.

Couldn’t make up a name like that if I tried.

The Mobile Plate Hunter 900 (why, oh why, did they go cheap and not call it the 9000? 9000 is a cool and studly number—900 is just wimpy) mounts on a patrol car and then scans license plates while the patrol car is moving; it sends the license plates it finds to a central computer, which then runs the plate. If a car has been reported stolen, the system alerts the driving officer who can then proceed to investigate.

I wish so fervently that the manufacturer had enough of a sense of humor to use an R2-D2 beep for the unit’s alerts.

Soundtrack: Stream from Groove Salad

Alastair Reynolds hits it out of the park with Revelation Space, a heady mixture of hard sf, space opera, and cyberpunk with a huge and epic scope.

The plotting and universe-building are first-rate, as are some of the characterizations, especially the über-cyberpunk crew of the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity—a lighthugger is a spacecraft that can almost reach the speed of light—who are just as weird as you’d imagine somebody would get from spending centuries in real time aboard their vessel, occasionally touching down on planets that are always changing dramatically from the passage of time.

The aliens of Revelation Space are also truly alien, which is a nice change of pace from the usual space opera “people with weird skin colors and bumps on their foreheads” aliens.

On the down side, the novel sometimes gets a bit wordy and Byzantine, and some of the central characters never really go beyond stereotypes. But those are minor quibbles—Revelation Space is the real deal.

Broken Angels is the follow-up to Richard Morgan’s fantastic Altered Carbon [review here] and continues the story of Takeshi Kovacs.

A forceful debut like Altered Carbon is a tough act to follow, and in a sense, Morgan doesn’t try. While Altered Carbon was dark cyber punk channeling classic noir detective stories as it explored the issues of what happens with humanity when your “soul” is detached from your body, Broken Angels is dark science fiction with good measures of warfare thrown in. This doesn’t make it better or worse than Altered Carbon, just a quite different experience.

In Broken Angels Kovacs is a mercenary taking part in a brutal civil war that is tearing a planet apart when he gets involved in a search for an ancient relic that promises to provide vast technological breakthroughs for humanity.

The back story is that humanity has made great advances by using technology left behind by an ancient race that is now mysteriously absent, and great effort is being put into finding more relics and deciphering their use. The novel deals with how the almost cargo-cult like position humanity has found itself in affects the way society functions.

That being said, the novel is packed with ample sex and mayhem, and moves along at a brisk pace.

As long as you don’t expect a copy of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels is a solid read.

Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon is nothing less than the return of jacked-in, mirror-shades-at-night, in-your-face Cyberpunk.

Half a millennia from now, humanity has discovered the remnants of an ancient, vastly technologically superior civilization. Most recovered artifacts from this civilization are vaguely, if at all, understood—among the few things that have been deciphered are star charts leading to other Earth-compatible worlds, which has led to colony ships being sent out. However, due to the lack of faster-than-light technology, the colonies end up being isolated in space apart from the ability to transmit digital information through something called needlecasts.

The most dramatic technological breakthrough invented by humans is the ability to download a digital version of the self into an implanted piece of hardware at the base of the skull called a stack. This way, when a person dies, the self can be downloaded into another body—the only way to die Real Death is if the stack is physically destroyed.

To provide order in far-flung human space, a special elite corps called Envoys has been created. Members of this corps are needlecast to wherever they are needed, downloaded into waiting bodies and then sent on their missions.

The novel’s protagonist, Takeshi Kovachs, is a disgraced former Envoy who is needlecast to Earth to help solve the “murder” of a wealthy industrialist.

Altered Carbon is fast-moving and dense, with the dehumanizing consequences of stack technology providing a hard edge and and a linchpin for the plot to revolve around. Think Neuromancer meets Dashiell Hammett. It is rich in ideas and doesn’t flinch from the darker sides of humanity.

Highly recommended.

People suffering from diabetes have to regularly monitor the blood-sugar levels in their blood, which means extracting a small quantity of blood and performing tests. But a new product promises a non-invasive means of monitoring blood sugar: contact lenses that sense glucose. How it works:

[…] scientists added boronic acid to disposable contact lenses. Moisture from the tear ducts contains glucose that binds with the molecules of boronic acid, with the reaction causing fluorescence. A handheld device flashes a blue light into the eye and measures the intensity of the resulting glow, letting the user know their blood glucose level.

Apart from the obvious great value in making the lives of people with diabetes much easier, this one definitely scores a ten on the cyberpunk far-out scale. What else cool stuff could be measured this way? Stress levels? Drug consumption? Lactic acid in the blood stream from physical exhaustion?

What if instead of needing a special light at a certain wavelength, the color of the lenses themselves could alter based on the chemical compositions picked up?

Eyes are the windows of the soul, indeed.

Soundtrack: “Aftershock” by VNV Nation

In yet another major leap to bring us closer to the world of Neuromancer, judicial workers in Mexico have been implanted with RFID chips. The idea is apparently to give the workers access to secure areas through the chips, but since corruption is a major problem in Mexico, there are also some thoughts to being able to track their whereabouts at all times.

Now, I’m just a cave man, and your modern world scares and confuses me, but the thought of having my own personal radio station embedded into my skin kind of creeps me out, especially since there’s no way to turn the damn things off. Meaning that anybody with an RFID reader will be able to track you like the slab of meat you are.

So in the arsenal of ways to circumvent security in techno-thrillers, we need to add “cut out RFID chip” to “cut off hand and keep warm to foil fingerprint reader” and “take out iris and implant in heroin-addicted stooge to fool eye scanner.” At least removing an RFID chip should be much less gruesome than eyes and hands.

Coincidentally, Wired has an interesting article about deployment of RFID-enabled groceries.

Listening To: “The Tide Is High” by Blondie