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| If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. |
I get confused. Not generally, as in amyloid plaque-damaged neurons misfiring, did I make a cup of tea or no, why am I wet, you’ve had an accident Grandpa sort-of confused; more in the I watched the stupid TV show around the same time as reading the books and now can’t remember if I read or watched it sort-of confused.
Just to clarify, the now cancelled TV show was not stupid (or any more stupid than any other sci-fi TV show that gets cancelled despite being quite good).
So, just to be semi-professional, I spent a few minutes refreshing my memory, so as to be able to inform you lucky, lucky people. Here I go.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? No, don’t worry, future civilisation hasn’t been founded on the epistles of Paul the apostle (whilst perhaps more desirable it would have made for a pretty dull trilogy), but rather thanks to the highly implausible discovery that there were once advanced but inscrutable beings with technology capable of rendering humanity immortal, amongst other things. The human mind can now be downloaded into a cortical stack (implanted in the spine at the base of the skull) as DHF – digital human freight – meaning that even if the body dies, the person survives, so long as the stack isn’t damaged (so-called ‘real death’). They can be re-sleeved in a totally new body, assuming they have the funds, or be stored indefinitely, or even be needle-cast to one of the many worlds revealed by the alien’s star maps. One such world is Harlan’s World.
Enter Takeshi Lev Kovacs.
As a child in the slums of Newpest, Tak ran with the wrong crowd until, aged 17, he joined the UN Protectorate armed forces, before being selected to join the Envoys, highly trained super-soldiers; infiltrators deployed ahead of military action and endowed with skills giving them heightened insight and awareness, and vaguely defined empathic ability. However, not being one of the corps' best at taking orders, he jumps ship and goes underground, working as a merc.
So far, so knight-errant. On with the plot synopsis!
After being killed on a job, he is stored on-stack until, years later, he’s pulled out of storage to solve the ‘murder’ of a Meth, one of a class the impossibly rich who can afford to have multiple clones on ice and their stacks backed-up in case of premature death, making them near unkillable. The Meth has no recollection of the previous two days and no idea who killed him or why. Tak’s new sleeve just happens to be the sleeve of a disgraced former cop and lover of officer Kristen Ortega. And of course he ends up sleeping with her because, why wouldn’t he. Ooh, and also the wife of the ‘dead’ Meth. After a bit of bloodshed, righteous killings, the odd Russian madman, his investigations lead him to a flying brothel, a real-death virus, and a twisted plot to prevent those whose religion prevents them from being re-sleeved from being brought back to life to testify against their murderers.
Blah-de-blah plot twist denouement, and Kovacs wins the day, everyone we hoped would get their wish does so, and Tak gets to go home to Harlan’s World.
Books two and three are similar in tone, unremitting violence and gratuitous sex, and Kovacs, despite facing the massive forces of corporate greed, the flexed muscle of Meth families, sentient war machines, alien battle behemoths and, in one instance, an earlier version of himself, comes through with only massive sleeve damage and the mental scars anyone might suffer after living hundreds of years past what might be considered natural and experiencing (and delivering) plenty of organic trauma for reasons honorable and otherwise.
Yes, I have run out of reviewer’s steam.
But DAMN if this isn’t a cracking cyber-punk detective series, no confusion here! It’s tight, it’s fast, there’s action and adventure, and lots of kick-ass ladies for whom Kovacs is more than willing to thrust his lance at metaphorical windmills. The tech is credible even if its provenance is implausible, and the world building is superb. Given my track record of picking stories of hard men with soft centres who are tired of being the good guy but just can’t help it, despite their world-weary cynicism (and there is plenty of railing against the injustice of the system here), this was bound to trip my sensors, but my own bizarre peccadillos aside, it’s still undeniably good, and it’s a genuine disappointment to me to read Morgan has no plans for a fourth instalment.
(Paid links - and you can get the trilogy here: https://amzn.to/3vZ4v6L)
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