Reviews and Comments

Broken Angels is, ultimately, a good science fiction story hobbled by horrible characters and poor pacing. I nearly gave it three stars, but finally settled on two since despite the strong points, I was ultimately more annoyed than anything else.

Our protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is an insufferable, all-capable, unbelievably cynical cyberpunk stereotype. Of all the POV characters you could theoretically have to look into a world as peculiar as this, using one who has no empathy and practically no sense of wonder is a very uninspired choice. A 13-year-old me might have thought it cool and badass (ooh, look, twin Kalashnikovs), an older me just finds it juvenile and tiresome. The numerous minor characters made me suspect that the author may actually be incapable of writing anyone except tough-as-nails macho assholes. At least they had interesting names.

Broken Angels has a planetary war, a treasure hunt, alien mysteries, corporate espionage and treachery; it's got all the building blocks of an excellent science fiction thriller, but somehow always manages to focus on exactly the wrong things. The story takes way too long to actually get going, and the journey to the Really Interesting Stuff (which, it has to be said, was interesting enough to keep me reading) has numerous speed bumps where stuff happens to nasty people I don't care about in the least. The morally strange area inhabited by the characters would have been interesting, if they hadn't all been bloody sociopaths.

I was kind of looking forward to Altered Carbon the TV series, but on reading this, I was reminded what a tiresome protagonist Kovacs was, and now I wonder whether I can stomach him on the small screen.

The Revolution Trade brings the first series of the Merchant Princes to a cataclysmic, horrifying finish. This is a strange book, hampered by a structure that doesn't quite work and having not as much a plot as a domino set of consequences from things that have happened in previous volumes. Stross is typically very thorough in exploring a detalied (if not always 'realistic') results of outlandish premises, and one cannot help but feel that in Merchant Princes this approach is at odds with a gripping plot. Revolution Trade reads more like a roleplaying campaign or a wargame that's gone off the rails than a tightly plotted novel. Possible and actual editorial errors pop up here and there to annoy the alert reader.

Even so, this is powerful, provcative stuff that I can't help but recommend, despite its un-evenness. Ultimately Stross gives us a full-on nuclear holocaust, and our main characters cannot but turn tail and run away, abandoning thousands of their vassals to a horrible death. Self-sacrificing heroes they are not, and the noblesse oblige of the Clan turns out to be just so much window dressing when they face an enemy that can absolutely devastate them and their tiny medieval kingdom.