dexxyoto said:
I have to disagree with that. In the universe he's created Broken Angels had a perfectly valid plotline, there were references to the Martians and such all through Altered Carbon. And the final book in the trilogy, Woken Furies, took a step away from how both previous books flowed, I felt a welcome change to so many writers who seem to fall into ruts with continuing storylines.
My problems with Broken Angels are as follows:
-Kovacs betrays people constantly. For no reason, in many cases. Often, when going along with what somebody is doing would greatly benefit him, he betrays them for no benefit. Even when it's not a matter of ideology, he betrays people for reasons like "I don't like them" when he knows that doing so will put him up against tons of baddies, and NOT doing so will give him exactly what he wants. Altered Carbon Kovacs wasn't this stupid. He didn't just start shooting people because he didn't like them.
-There is no story. This is a book about stuff happening. This is not a novel about an idea, or a character (because kovacs doesn't get character development, and *spoiler* almost everyone dies anyway,) this is a movie about "things that happen" and the characters reacting to them. The spaceship exploration plot is in turns extremely boring (when they're waiting around) and poorly-explained.
-The level of brutality, profanity and sexuality is so over-the-top it enters God of War 2 or Planet Terror levels of loony, comedic farce. Every character is always on the brink of nervous, physical or mental collapse. That's not drama, it's stupid. Kovacs' whole ideology in this movie is stupid, he seems to believe whatever he needs to believe to get to the next scene, regardless of whether this matches with anything in Altered Carbon or even earlier parts of Broken Angels.
-Finally, Morgan's writing style enters "Song of Kali" Simmons-levels of pomp and arrogance. Count how many words he writes compared to how much he's actually saying. If we judge quality in writing as the ability to communicate a great deal effectively, Morgan fails in this respect. Altered Carbon didn't have this problem, imo, but Altered Carbon had a constantly-shifting plot focus, interesting characters and didn't have a bunch of people hanging out on a beach/desert (forget which) for what seems like forever while they try to figure out what to do to move to the Rendezvous with Rama "situation."
If you liked Broken Angels, cool. I didn't, and it made me not want to read the third Kovacs book. Well, that and Market Forces, which is even more ridiculously stupid. Yes, powerful, wealthy men in the future settle disputes in armored cars (but not in, say, tanks that have cannons on them). Yes, this is plausible. >_>
