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On September 27th one of the year’s most highly anticipated science fiction novels will officially be released in North America. Woken Furies, written by Richard K. Morgan, is to complete the trilogy series of Takeshi Kovacs, one of the most intriguing characters to come along since Molly from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Hiro Protagonist from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, or even Neo from The Matrix. The Takeshi Kovacs novels are probably the best cyberpunk fiction available today. Growing fans of the series are in agreement that there’s a new king of cyberpunk sci fi and he’s Richard K. Morgan, 2003 winner of the Philip K. Dick Award (for Altered Carbon). If you’ve already read Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, you will already recognize the literary and theatrical influences in the world of Takeshi Kovacs. These influences would include movies like Blade Runner and the cyberpunk world envisioned by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. You’ll find that Morgan acknowledges most of these influences and more at his website (www.richardkmorgan.com), where you can also read his blogs and find up what the writer is up to. The world Morgan has designed is a universe filled with glittery-technology and a somewhat Babylonian decadence. In the novel, Altered Carbon, the first of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, the world is colorful, tech-extremist, beautiful and horrific. It's often a desolate place, meshed with oddly old-fashioned, pulp fiction-like dark noir elements. It could be compared to Blade Runner, but the Kovacs’ verse has gone supremely past that 1982 flick. The world of Kovacs exhibits more innovative and disturbing imagination, with an evolution of humanity that is purely of Morgan’s own unique vision. Beyond the storylines or the scenery, you might ponder the source of the heavy philosophy that Takeshi Kovacs regularly seems to tout in these novels. You'll get the impression Kovacs is an even more complicated man than we’ve been allowed to see. His simple observations of the human condition have a thickness that surrounds him. They are contemplations that make too much sense for a man of his capabilities. To add to the intrigue, you might find Kovacs to be quite a romantic at heart as well. All of these characteristics counter with Kovacs’ ability to kill people so easily when required. Morgan contemplated these interpretations. “I never really saw Kovacs' philosophizing as particularly deep. He's relatively clear-visioned, perhaps as a consequence of his Envoy conditioning, perhaps merely because of high natural intelligence and a shitty upbringing, but what he sees isn't anything most of us won't see if we just open our eyes and stop kidding ourselves. I guess in that sense all I'm doing is offering an extended critique of the various types of willful ignorance human beings like to practice. Religion, patriotism, revolutionary politics, that kind of thing. And as for killing, Kovacs is superlatively good at it - he's just not under any illusions about the relativistic moral maneuvering that his (and our) political leaders go through trying to justify certain acts of violence against certain others. Bombard civilians in Iraq good, blow up civilians in London, bad. That kind of thing.” This “Envoy conditioning” and the concept of digitizing human consciousness into new bodies, plus a cyberpunk world we haven’t seen designed so well since Blade Runner, could have been what caught Hollywood’s eye. When Morgan’s first novel gained critical acclaim and people started hearing about the appeal of the Kovacs saga, the rights to Altered Carbon were promptly sold over to Warner Brothers and there is supposed to be a movie somewhere in the future. Fans of these novels are waiting, no, craving it. Morgan explains, “Currently, there's no new information on the Altered Carbon movie - the option is due for renewal in November, so we'll see then if there's continuing interest in the project or not. The problem is that with Hollywood, no matter what news you hear about "development", until you have a big name star or director actually signed to the deal, it all means exactly nothing. I'm told Spielberg renewed a yearly option on Mike Marshall Smith's novel Spares four times at a cost of $100,000 a pop - and then went off to make Minority Report instead. So who knows what's going to happen with Altered Carbon? I try not to worry about it too much, and just focus on my own current work. If the film gets made, it gets made, if it doesn't, it doesn't. But in the meantime, the option money has enabled me to become a full time writer several years before it would otherwise have been possible, and for that I'm very grateful.” If there is going to be a movie, then who would play the part of Kovacs? I have my own imagination running away with me here. Why not a grizzled Brad Pitt or a really scarred up Johnny Depp? They're just going to be “sleeves” after all. Morgan set me straight. “As to casting Kovacs, I've got nothing against either Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp - I think they're both fine actors, and in Pitt's case at least much under-rated. But my image of the Ryker sleeve Kovacs wears in Altered Carbon is much closer to the old school of noir movie hard men - something like Lee Marvin in Point Blank or Burt Lancaster in The Midnight Man. Ryker is supposed to be big and blunt and in his early forties. I think the best suggestion anyone's come up with for casting that from today's ranks of leading men is Benicio del Toro with a razored hair. Or maybe Bruce Willis, but I think he's getting a little old for the part these days.” Speaking of growing old, how did Morgan come up with his ideas on living forever? I also wonder if living for centuries would really make someone so weary over time. “Must have been a creeping sense of incipient mortality as I hit my late twenties, something Kovacs defines in Broken Angels as the warning signal "blink-blink - limited time remaining", he laughs. “No, seriously the sleeving concept isn't new, at least not in science fiction. William Gibson and the cyberpunk crew nailed the idea of digitizing human personality so you could take it beyond physical death twenty odd years ago. And even before that you've got writers like Robert Sheckley playing around with the idea of transferable souls in Immortality Inc, which he wrote way back in the late fifties. So the idea has a long and honorable pedigree - I just hot-wired it and drove it away!” “As to the idea of what immortality in a series of bodies would do to you,” Morgan continues, “I think that's just basic extrapolation. Human beings are evolved to last a certain amount of time, and that goes for our mental and emotional processes as well as our physical selves. So it stands to reason that the longer you live, the less like a "normal" human being you become. And I do think that it would take a tremendous amount of willpower to keep going through the process of aging and dying time and time again. Think of how people who lose a relationship, or a loved one, or even a long-term job can often be shattered by it, and have a hard time starting again. Now extrapolate to the kind of dislocation you'd have to endure if you lived for centuries and died repeatedly. I think it's fair to assume there'd be some fairly major psychological fallout from that kind of lifestyle!” Morgan’s novels make you think. Think so hard you can get headaches from pondering the possibilities he has designed through his fiction. But is this really just fiction? Could the technology of digitizing human consciousness into other bodies or virtual worlds be a reality for our future? Science fiction lovers often feel like they were born before their time. We think on the magnitude and impact of the visions we read about in books like Altered Carbon and Broken Angels and we want to know if it could eventually become a technological reality. Many of us even read science articles and news stories to find the future in them. For example, we’ve learned about the experiments going on at universities with computer implants. Stories like a blind man who can now see with the aid of computer technology, for example (Wired 2002). Then there’s the story about a university professor that opens doors and turns on lights with the aid of his computer implants (CNN 2000). I asked Morgan if his version of the future is really that far off from our real future. “I'm not convinced, to be honest.” He maintains. “Current research seems to suggest that human thought and memory has less in common with a computer model of data and more to do with quantum effects. Then again, as I understand it, pretty much everything has to do with quantum effects when you get down to it, so who knows….. And yeah, if it is coming, damn right I'm pissed off that I'm going to miss it. But on the other hand, I was born late enough to miss the Black Death, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Second World War, so maybe I should just be counting my blessings.” He’s got a point. I decided to leave it at that. Besides, by letting the visionaries create fiction as good as these novels, we are propelled to design new technology or at least come as close to it as possible. The true nature of our universe is too complex for the human race to ever really understand it all. And this generates a lot of hope and as Morgan said, “damn right I'm pissed off that I'm going to miss it.” I have to agree. Beyond futuristic human technology, there’s even an alien technology we get a peak at in Broken Angels, the second book in the series. Where did the concept of the Martians and their technology come from? It's hardcore sci-fi at its best. I wondered if he had consulted with scientists or even archeologists while writing Broken Angels. “No, I wrote Broken Angels pretty much unaided, though some of my general popular science reading did end up informing elements of the story like the bubble dynamics inside the Martian starship and the evolutionary factors in the nanotech. As far as the Martians themselves are concerned, again, the idea of a long vanished elder race is no new thing in science fiction. I just borrowed what I needed from the tradition and tailored it to suit. I wrote my first ever Martians - in a short, never-published mood piece a couple of decades ago - with wings, and that's the way I've always had them in my mind. I think the idea probably comes at base from the mythic association of winged beings in human religion and lore. Angels have wings, demons have wings, all manner of mythological beasts have wings, and usually there's an association of power in all this. It stands to reason - anyone who's ever seen a large raptor soaring can vouch for the awe it inspires. These are creatures who command the skies, the abode of, or at least the pathway to, the gods. As to the technology, none of that is hugely original either; instant transport gates have been around forever in science fiction, and so have huge, abandoned starships. I just tried to give it a fresh twist - the star gate is a compressed, folded and hunched thing denoting its ability to warp space, rather than the standard issue vaginal opening so beloved of TV sci-fi; the starship is built with a plasticity science not yet available to humans, and its ancillary machines are autonomous mobile creatures with mostly unguessable functions. These things just came to me as I was pouring Broken Angels hot into the mould, and again I'd say they were largely informed by a desire to create powerful motif-laden imagery rather than any conscious attempt to invent a new technology.” One of the problems with the Kovacs’ series is that you want more of his world explored. Morgan has created characters that are just about as interesting as Kovacs and you want to know more about their life and their experiences. Beyond the vision, Morgan’s character development is another part of the allure of his works. It’s all about the details and intrigue. I asked him if he had thought about creating another story about a different character out of Kovacs' world. “That one is on the cards. Right now, I'm trying to get away from Kovacs and his universe and to invent something fresh, but there's just too much good material lying around in the background not to want to go back and use some of it at some point. As to which character(s) I might use, that's wide open. I always had a soft spot for Trepp, the Zen psycho lesbian (or not?) enforcer from Altered Carbon, more than anything because she and her motivations remain so much of a mystery. Why does she help Kovacs out? Why does she work for Kawahara? How did she end up in New York, and where's she from before that? These are questions I'd quite like answered myself. But whether you could build a decent novel on that is another matter. I guess time will tell.” Woken Furies, the next and supposedly final book in the Kovacs’ storyline is about to be released in North America. In this novel, Kovacs returns to his home planet, Harlan's World, which is 95% ocean and has an ancient alien orbital system that still vaporizes anything that flies too high. Reviews are already pouring in out of the UK where the book was released in March. Readers are saying that this is the best in the series, which is no small feat by any standards. Fans are delighted by the return of Kovacs and to learn more of what makes him tick. There’s serious history here and we get to see more sides to Kovacs’ psyche in the new book. I asked Morgan why he decided to bring Kovacs to his home planet and why is it likely that this is the last Kovacs novel he’ll write, according to his blog.
“I think the Harlan's World novel was inevitable, once I'd accepted that I was going to do more than one Kovacs book. You can feel its influence pretty clearly in Altered Carbon, and by the time you hit Broken Angels, I'm already giving it serious secondary consideration. By the end of Broken Angels, it was definitely time to go there. Basically, I wanted to trace a path back to Kovacs' early life and influences, in essence to examine who he actually is and how he got that way. But at the same time, I didn't want to get into writing "prequels", because I really think that's a losing game. Once you start going back and strip-mining your original inspirations, you're into the law of diminishing returns and pretty soon your whole invented universe starts to ring hollow and used. So what this meant was that I had to write a homecoming novel - a geographical, emotional and psychological return to old influences, but at the same time a narrative that moves forward with the established character and not back." Morgan continues, "Bound up with that are also the reasons why I don't plan to write any more Kovacs novels. Having introduced the character out of context in Altered Carbon, taken readers through a guided tour of Kovacs in his professional capacity in Broken Angels, and finally opened up his formative influences in Woken Furies, I don't really feel there's anywhere else I can take the man. Or at least not anywhere that would provide sufficient character development to be interesting either to me, or to the reader. Of course, series characters have a huge commercial and comfort appeal, and I'm not immune to either of those temptations - but every series character I have ever read eventually succumbs to that same law of diminishing returns, and the thought of falling into that trap scares me far more than the ease and the cash attract me. You take the pitcher to the well one too many times and suddenly you're not writing anymore, you're just churning out product for a fat advance. Now, I have no objection to fat advances, but I do think it's incumbent on a writer to actually earn said advance by practicing his craft for real, not just stamping out replica books like some factory robot. That's why each Kovacs book is somewhat different to the last in tone and plot dynamics, that's why I wrote Market Forces, and that's why now I'm putting Kovacs away and trying again to do something else fresh. That's not to say that in a few years, I may not go back. A fan of my stuff from San Diego, Terry Hertzler, who's also a poet and writer in his own right, when I told him all this, just shrugged and said 'Hey, that's cool. In five or ten years time you'll be a different guy, and that means Kovacs will be a different guy, and who knows what you might have to say about him by then.' Terry is a good five to ten years older than me, so I'm going to take his word for it. I'm not saying Never Again - but for now, I've decided Less is definitely More.” Morgan’s mention of his novel Market Forces, a near future, somewhat satirical story (not of the Kovacs series) reminded me of the critical acclaim he recently received for that novel, winning the John W Campbell award in 2005. I wanted to know what surprised him the most about the accolades that came along after the Market Forces’ North American release. “To be honest, my initial surprise was at how much hostility and relative lack of success Market Forces aroused. I'd had the story around for ages in various forms, and I'd always seen it as a good, solid dystopian tale in the tradition of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but nailed to a more visceral high velocity narrative. In the UK, this expectation was - more or less - borne out and the book was received well enough, as a creditable effort to do something else besides my Kovacs trick. But in the US, there was a remarkably strong reaction against the novel from a number of quarters, including people who'd clearly enjoyed the Kovacs books. And even with the John W Campbell Award, Market Forces still doesn't shift copies anywhere near as well as Kovacs. Now some of that's pretty clearly down to political orientation - those on the neo-liberal right apparently haven't enjoyed being told their system stinks - and some more of it seems to have been because of the rather unedifying ethics and behavior of Market Forces' principal characters. But I was still taken aback by that, because - I thought - the politics in the Kovacs books was pretty much on open display and just as clearly critical of the same right wing tendencies, and because Kovacs himself is hardly what you'd call a clean cut heroic figure. Anyway, by the time I got nominated for the Clarke award and actually won the Campbell award, I had in all honesty pretty much forgotten about Market Forces. Woken Furies was already out in the UK, and I was hard at work on something else again. But there I was, suddenly surprised all over again, and delighted this time, not least because this seemed like something of a vindication after all the initial flak. “ Although Market forces is not a distant future fiction and is set in the mid-21st century, it’s well worth the read if you think about it. Envision a world where to get anywhere up a particular corporate ladder, you’ll have to kill someone to do it. And society approves. Interesting concept, especially for anyone suffering from some serious glass ceiling misfortune in present day. It’s an interesting concept I haven’t seen done, unless you want to consider a few distant similarities with the movies Rollerball (1975 and 2002), or Death Race 2000 (1975), or maybe even Mad Max. In Market Forces, however, the setting is in the corporate arena of “Conflict Investment”, which is an oddly interesting way to manage warfare. Again, Morgan’s allure is in his ability to contemplate the “what ifs” for us all. One of the other side affects of science-fiction loving-geekiness is an affinity for video games, especially scary sci-fi horror games. While reading Morgan’s novels I kept thinking that the Takeshi Kovacs’ verse would make a fantastic backdrop for a video game. Hollywood also likes to tie the two industries of film and games together as their latest marketing trend. Could a Kovacs video game be somewhere in the crystal ball? And this led me to ask if Morgan likes to play video games. “Well, I have been approached by numerous games builders, both independent individuals and major companies, though obviously I've had to turn all these people away because the right to make a Kovacs game is tied into the Warner Brothers film option. But certainly a game is a possibility, either via the eventual arrival of the movie and, as you say, an industry tie-in, or maybe straight to game if Warner decide in the end to relinquish their option. I'm not a huge game player myself, though I do have an Xbox and a soft spot for a few sterling examples of the form - big favorites are Max Payne, The Suffering and Doom 3. The problem for me is that most of the gaming out there is low grade, mindless shite that insults your intelligence AND pulls its punches at the same time. The target demographic seems to be - hey, probably is - a fourteen year old male illiterate with half his frontal cortex burned out. So those three titles I've named, and a few others rise, like skyscrapers of artistic integrity, out of a swamp of crass, mediocre product. As a result, I tend to play the good stuff to death and then suffer for months at a time until something halfway decent comes out. I'm currently waiting impatiently for Suffering 2; the Ties that Bind in the, perhaps vain, hope that it'll be even half as stunningly good as its predecessor. “ So now we have a newly crowned “King of Cyberpunk Fiction”. In my opinion, Morgan has usurped those who influenced him. While Gibson is waning and Stephenson’s novels gather dust in my library, I figured I’d give the "new guy" a tip. I noted on his blog that he had complained about his computer and wanted to get a new one. I told him that with the new title I've given him he should really get an amazingly techy laptop. Something he could just jack into. He has an image to uphold after all. After politely telling me I was being too kind, Morgan confessed that he had already acquired something pretty cool. “A state of the art data-slate, eh? Well, I remember reading an interview with William Gibson somewhere, in which he admitted to being embarrassingly low tech, given his reputation as the inventor of cyberpunk. Apparently Neuromancer was written on a battered old manual typewriter, not even an electric, and even at the time of the interview, some time in the late nineties, he was still working on an ancient Apple Mac 2 that one of his kids didn't want anymore. To some extent I sympathize with Gibson's position. I've never been heavily into computers, I also have worked largely on old, out of date and hand me down machines, (and mostly Macs), and these days my wife is far more competent at almost every aspect of data-handling and software command than I will ever be. But…. A little while ago, it became apparent that I was going to be losing substantial chunks of writing time while away at conventions, on tour etc…and so I've finally succumbed and bought myself a fast iBook. It is pretty much state of the art, it does look hi-tech and gorgeous, and I will now have to get hold of a desktop G5 to back it up when I'm writing from home (I hate laptop keyboards, they give you cramps in your neck and shoulders). So that's me, upgraded. And when Apple brings out a meat/mech direct interface, and they'll undoubtedly get there before anyone else and be ten times as efficient and user friendly as anybody else's later, similar rip-off, I'll be there - if only for the gaming capacity.”
References and Related Links: www.richardkmorgan.com
http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/
www.philipkdickaward.org
http://www.ku.edu/~sfcenter/campbell.htm
VISION QUEST - A HALF CENTURY OF ARTIFICIAL-SIGHT RESEARCH…” By Steven Kotler – Wired Magazine Issue 10.09 | Sep 2002
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html
Professor to wire computer chip into his nervous system - The Story of Professor Kevin Warwick - CNN.COM December 7, 2000 By CNN Correspondent Ann Kellan
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/12/07/robot.man/ Note: This feature is also available in the 2005 Summer/Fall Print Issue of JIVE Magazine Additional Credits:
Katie Seyba, Chris Choyce, Trevor Ostrowski - Editing Assistance
Low Tek - Co-Producer - Print Version Layout Design
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