Woken Furies Book

This was another good instalment in Richard Morgan's excellent Takeshi Kovacs series. I find Morgan's writing to be super engaging and the story itself delivers a good mix of action, humor, and mystery while still giving the reader plenty of thought-provoking themes to ponder.

This third book took us back to Harlan's World, Takeshi's much mentioned home world. Never one to live the quiet life Takeshi finds himself on a brutal mission of retribution against those who have wronged him before he gets caught up in some local revolutionary politics. This instalment also sees him face his most deadly enemy yet: himself!

As always the story was quite compelling. We have heard a lot about both Harlan's World and the Quellists so it was good to learn a lot more about both. I also quite enjoyed Tak's personal journey. He has never been the most stable guy in the world but in this instalment he begins to show the signs that living such a harsh and brutal life for so long is finally starting to catch up with him. The other thing that really caught my interest was some of the cool new technology that had developed as a result of Takeshi's actions in the second book.

I thought Altered Carbon was a sci-fi noir mystery tale and that Broken Angels was a weird mix of military sci-fi, techno-thriller, and a sci-fi horror story. I find Woken Furies even harder to classify as it is part classic revenge tale, part techno-thriller, and part spy vs spy story!

As always Morgan's story takes a dim view on both religion, capitalism, and war. The good news is I felt like this instalment had a tiny bit less negativity towards advanced technology. I do enjoy the fact that Morgan writes interesting and thought provoking sci-fi but never lets any of that stuff overwhelm either his characters or the story itself.

I feel like Morgan got the balance OK. This was a dark, gritty, cynical, and often brutal story but it only occasionally got too bleak. Takeshi was not quite so easy to root for in this instalment as his sanity became questionable but in the end Morgan still managed to make me sympathize with him as a character. His cynical outlook on life and wry humor did lighten the tone at times and some of his actions provide moments where we could cheer for him!

I'd rate this third instalment of the series as slightly weaker than the first couple of books. It suffered a lull phase in the middle of the story and Tak himself was not always as easy to root for and I think both of those issues contributed to a small dull phase around the middle of the story. Morgan did get the story, and Tak, back on track fairly quickly so it did not damage my enjoyment of the story too much but it was definitely a bad phase that neither of the first two books suffered from.

The other big flaw in this series is the casual misogyny and it lingered in the back of this one again. The most annoying aspect of this is the fact that all of the major female characters are just casual fucks for Takeshi.

Al in all I still enjoyed this book a lot and would definitely rate the Takeshi Kovacs series on the whole as one of my sci-fi favourites. It seems a pity we never got a 4th instalment!

Rating: 4 stars.

Audio Note: William Dufris took over the narration from Todd McLaren and I felt like he did a decent job on the whole. This sort of book played to his strengths as a narrator. The big flaw was the way he mispronounced Kovacs. It was mentioned in the first book how it was pronounced so for both Dufris and the producer to miss that shows neither bothered to read the first couple of books in the series or listen to any of the audio from the first two books. This sort of lazy and half-arsed preparation is why we suffer such lack of consistency when audio series change narrator mid way through:(