Martin's Booklog

Black Man – Richard Morgan

Published on April 3, 2010

Cover of Black Man

Black Man
Richard Morgan
630 pages
published in 2007

This was too much of a rerun for me. Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen for obvious reasons) has much the same plot as Morgan’s first novel Altered Carbon. A worldweary, cynical but ubercompetent mercenary is blackmailed into going after a murderer and in the process uncovers a far greater and more horrible truth than he suspected existed or his employers necessarily wanted him to find out. As with every Morgan novel I’ve read so far it’s an edge of your seat thriller, keeps you engaged to the bitter end, but five minutes later you’re thinking “that’s all“? I got the feeling Morgan was going through the motions, his heart not in it and it just seemed too slight to be worth a Clarke Award.

One big reason for the discomfort I felt was the silly worldbuilding. Morgan is excellent at creating a “realistic” sounding world, using infodumps, incluing and jargon to create an image in his readers’ heads, but it doesn’t work when he bases his future on the infamous Jesusland map. Remember 2006, after Bush had started his second (stolen) term and before the Congressional midterm elections, and how many of the liberal leaning blogs were despairing of their country? How it really seemed for a moment the US was split in two, with progressive coasts and an ignorant flyover country? Yeah? Remember also how fast that changed once the Democrats actually won an election? Well, it’s this that Morgan bases his future on: the Jesusland maps and books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. It was already dated when he was writing it, now just feels hopelessly silly. It makes it hard to take the world Morgan created seriously.

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City – Gwendolyn Leick

Published on March 21, 2010

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City

Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City
Gwendolyn Leick
252 pages including index
published in 1993

Continuing with my interest in Bronze Age history, I got Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City from the library, about the only book on Mesopotamia actually present there at the time and not hopelessly (decades) out of date. I know little about Mesopotamia other than the stuff everybody knows, it being probably the oldest civilisation in the world, inventors of written language and the city, yaddayaddaya. All I knew about it I learned from my old childrens encyclopedias, long obsolete even when I read them some twenty years ago…

Gwendolyn Leick didn’t set out to write a general history, but more of an overview of the ten most important cities that made up the area: Eridu, Uruk, Shuruppak, Akkad, Ur, Sippar, Nippur, Ashur, Nineveh and Babylon. She does this in chronological order, with Eridu the oldest established and Babylon the youngest. Considering that Babylon was an old, old city when Rome yet had to be founded, you can imagine how old the earliest cities were, as far away in time from the founding of Rome as we are from its fall. Which is the most important point that I picked up from this book, how long Mesopotamia’s history was, that later cities might have had the same sort of relationship with the very first ones as we have with Rome and Greece.

Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan

Published on March 9, 2010

Cover of Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan
534 pages
published in 2002

Altered Carbon is Richard Morgan’s first novel. It made a strong impression, winning the Philip K. Dick Prize for best novel in 2003, as well as being optioned by Joel Silver, the sale of the movie rights enabling Morgan to become a fulltime writer. Since then Morgan has written several more novels, part of the same generation of British science fiction writers as Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I knew of him, but had not read anything of his until last year, when I read Broken Angels and was sucked in from the first page. So not for the first time I started a series in the wrong way, as that was actually the sequel to this book — not that it mattered, as all they shared was the hero, Takeshi Kovacs.

Whereas Broken Angels was a Dirty Dozen type war romp with the cynicsm turned up to eleven, Altered Carbon is more of a Chandleresque film noir story. It starts with Takeshi as amercenary on Harlan’s World being caught and killed in a police dragnet, to wake up on Earth minus one partner and forced to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, which everybody but the murder victim in question thinks is suicide. If Takeshi refuses to cooperate or fails in his task he’ll go back in storage for the next couple of centuries or so.

Broken Angels – Richard Morgan

Published on March 7, 2010

Cover of Broken Angels

Broken Angels
Richard Morgan
490 pages
published in 2003

Richard Morgan is a British science fiction writer, who debuted in 2002 with Altered Carbon, to which Broken Angels is a sequel. It can however be easily read on its own, considering I just did that with no trouble at all. The only thing it has in common with the earlier novel is the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs. I’d been aware of Morgan as a hot new writer, but hadn’t sampled him yet. Reviews of his work had been mixed and I hadn’t been interested enough to seek his books out. Which may have been a mistake, judging from Broken Angels.

From the reviews I’d read and the remarks made by friends who had read his novels I had gotten the impression that Morgan let his leftwing politics overwhelm his stories, while he was also accused of having a lot of unnecessary violence in his stories. I found neither of these allegations to be true in this case. There is a political undertone to Broken Angels, but certainly no dozen page rants; there’s violence, but it’s not at all reveled in the way John Barnes sometimes does. It reminded me in fact of Neal Asher, another author often accused of excessive use of violence, in that neither shy away from showing the consequences of violence, that being shot hurts and what it exactly does to a body. But where Asher’s descriptions are very organic, dripping with ichor and blood and bodily fluids, Morgan’s is very clean, sharp, bright and clinical but not at all detached. His characters feel their pain. And they get plenty of opportunities to feel this pain.

The Trojans and their Neighbours – Trevor Bryce

Published on February 21, 2010

The Trojans and their Neighbours

The Trojans and their Neighbours
Trevor Bryce
225 pages including index
published in 2006

The cover looks like it should belong on the course book of a not particularly interesting IT certification course, but don’t let that fool you. Behind it hides one of the more engaging and interesting history books I’ve read in the past year or so. Which came as no surprise to me, as I had already read one of Trevor Bryce’s other history books, The Kingdom of the Hittites. The cover therefore couldn’t scare me off…

The subject itself helps as well of course. The story of Troy, the city at the heart of Homer’s Iliad, thought to be no more than a myth until Schliemann actually dug it up remains endlessly fascinating to anybody interested in ancient history. As Bryce mentions, even today the question of whether or not the Troy Schliemann dug up was the “real” Troy, Homer’s Troy is still hotly debated. But as Bryce argues, this is also the least interesting question you can ask about the actually existing Troy. Troy existed for several thousand years and was a flourishing community long before and after the Trojan War supposedly happened. With an emphasis on the Bronze Ages, The Trojans and their Neighbours attempts to put straight the real history and position of Troy — was it as important a city state as you would assume from Homer, or just another smallish Bronze Age settlement, and what were its relations with its neighbours?