Book review: Broken Angels

SciFi tosh, but better than the usual run, for slightly hard to identify reasons. The summary: <tough battle-hardened man> is recruited in a a warzone on a distant planet and after <recruiting the rest of the team> travels to an archeological dig to explore a <mysterious alien artifact> and <people die> before Our Hero wins the <climatic fight> in <surprising way> is quite generic, but the writing is better and the sense of mystery retained for longer than usual.

In the universe - and I like this bit - it turns out that Mars was inhabited, until about 50 kyr ago, by "Martians", though they came from elsewhere; and humanity is now slowly picking through the remains of their civilisation, including their star maps of where other inhabitable planets are (though if these creatures preferred Mars to Earth, their ideas of inhabitability clearly differ wildly from ours; the book carefully avoids the slightest discussion of whether they ever came to Earth).

It would be nice if the book thought about how this encounter has affected humanity, but apart from a little throwaway stuff - religions adapted - it doesn't. Did science wither, in favour of archeology? Or was it accelerated? I think RM's science is too weak for him to write around it.

Wiki tells me that "Writing for The Guardian, Colin Greenland found that Altered Carbon was about fighting against wealth and power"; when you look at his pic you'll see why; and anyway he wrote Take Back Plenty, on of the few SciFi books crappy enough that I didn't bother to finish. The book might possibly be said to have such themes; but really any philosophy in it is incoherent; it is ranting of the "You shot him! Meh, I'm a mercenary, blame the merchants for my evil!" variety or whatever. I think it is better considered as scene-setting, or simply dialogue. You can just as easily consider it a plea for free-market freedom which actually achieves things against the dead hand of government.

The bits along the lines of "the Martians were winged predadators, therefore their psychology must have been X" were annoyingly stupid. Ditto the Quellist mock-thought, which recalls the worst bits of Dune.

Plot holes are numerous. People's conciousness / memory / personality can be transmitted between the stars, and "resleeved" in new bodies. Mysteriously, no-one at all discusses the sources of the new bodies. Mysteriously, there is no market in fat old rich people dropping into toned young bodies. Mysteriously, no-one plays at swapping to a body of alternate sex; and so on. All of that, which would be social commentary, is just suppressed, because it would be terribly inconvenient. As would the familiar problems of duplication. As would the problems of "wouldn't you rather live in virtuality, it is much nicer in there?" - which would helpfully solve the problem of sourcing bodies. Weirdly, the only backup most people have is in their "cortical stack" whereas it would be natural to have a public repository; then people suffering "real death" - i.e., body and stack - would only lose since-last-backup. Banks, I'm pretty sure, faces up to this.

Oh yes, and despite all this re-animation, with mercenaries guaranteed a new body if killed, the characters still continue to treat death as a terrible thing and talk like grunts out of 'Nam. That brings me to the "torture people to death in public" scene which I thought tasteless and silly: having a policy like that is just dumb, for the reasons that become apparent.

Space travel is only roughly sketched in, and not very realistically: the colony ships can travel at near lightspeed (not very plausible in itself), whereas the military ships are much slower. But I think this is needed for him to get the expansion rate he needs.

The novel provides us with two wonders: a instantaneous-travel-gate, and a giant-alien-spaceship (and never really considers the lack of compatibility between these two items). They display a remarkable lack of interest in these wonders; pressure of situation might possibly justify that, but I still consider the book stunted for its lack of response. The reason being, of course, that Our Author has enough imagination to create / copy these items, but can't really fill them in. On the other hand the atmosphere on board the space ship is nicely done.

The "Our space ship is under attack from another space ship! Never mind, it is just an eternally-recurring 1.2 kyr pattern!" is dumb, because (as Our Author realises a little bit later) it would be too much of a coincidence for them to have turned up just at the right time. He is reduced to ridiculous straits, and decides that there's a whole fleet of suchlike, attacking, what, every day? (Using mega-weaponry, whose bleedin' obvious detonations are mysteriously invisible from not-very-far-away. Also, their deduction that the weapons are FTL isn't believable). That bit needed heavy rewriting to make some kind of sense. Just delete the attacks, I think, and find the sense of menace elsewhere. The book is, obvs, very much wham-bam; but that kind of storyline makes me think it was written that way too, without much prior plot outline or editing.

Trivia: this review points out his use of periods to write speech. The reviewer hated it; I liked it; perhaps because I do it myself.