Though Broken Angels's issues weren't exclusive to Takeshi Kovacs' soullessness, I see now, fresh off what will likely be the last novel in the Kovacs universe, that that second novel, easily the weakest of the trilogy, was largely a set up to the trilogy's conclusion. Though the bloodshed I noted in Broken Angels is still present, it is linked up to a purpose this time. Simply put, the most powerful force driving humanity is the want of dominion, in some form or another. And when that want of dominion turns the powerful into ruthless tyrants, sometimes the only way to free oneself from being subject to that tyranny is violence, soul-scarring violence which can never be taken back.
If Woken Furies is the last of the Kovacs novels, it appropriately ends set on the world upon which the series began, Harlan's World, the birthplace of our antihero and now, possibly, the birthplace of a newer and fairer human order. Having left behind the unpleasantness on Sanction IV, Kovacs is roaming the streets of his hometown, viciously executing a vendetta against an extremist religious cult for its senseless killing of two people close to him, when events conspire to have him hired onto a mercenary unit which has been hired to decontaminate a continent full of sentient, military weapons, ugly legacies of past wars. During his time with the mercenaries, his recruiter collapses, only to wake up with a different personality, one which bears a striking resemblance to the long dead Quellcrist Falconer, the influential leader of a failed revolution which sought to overthrow Harlan's World's corrupt government. Is she Falconer come back from the dead? And if so, how? Will she lead another revolution? Will it succeed this time, with Kovacs to back its play?
On points, Altered Carbon is the best of this trilogy by a considerable margin; however, Woken Furies is excellent in its own right. Where Carbon was essentially a detective's story shot through with vicious politics, Furies is a first-hand account of a revolution, its guts, its brutality, and its accommodations with not only ones enemies but the truth as well. This revolutionary spirit marks out Furies as a rare kind of novel, especially in science fiction, and that rarity grants it a power all its own. For the first time in this series, Kovacs has the scene stolen by another character, Quellcrist Falconer who, after being sprinkled throughout the first two books through quotations attributed to her, appears here in the flesh. And it's a credit to Mr. Morgan's ability to animate his characters that meeting Falconer feels an awful lot like how it might feel to meet Jesus Christ. She has the rock star's aura which is all the more potent given that Mr. Morgan doesn't enlist her aid to uplift the story. On the contrary, she's probably a darker character than Kovacs himself. It's the sense of amazement and hope that she sparks in others, and maybe even in us, that elevates her to a higher, purer place than any other participant in the story. Infusing a character with this degree of gravitas is, to say the least, a special feat and a worthy close to an incomparable trilogy of books by an author with serious juice. 4/5 Stars)
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