"Woken Furies": In a future world, clones and organized crime

"Woken Furies"
by Richard K. Morgan
Del Rey, 450 pp., $24.95

Takeshi Kovacs is back. Neo-noir hero of two previous Richard K. Morgan novels ("Altered Carbon," "Broken Angels"), he cuts a bloody swath through his birth planet of Harlan's World like the personification of his bioengineered blade of choice, a "Tebbit knife" doctored with a fast-acting Ebola-like virus.

"Woken Furies" pits Kovacs against oligarchs and organized crime: the hyper-rich family that owns Harlan's World; the thuggish, Japanese-descended yakuza; and the haiduci, the yakuza's Eastern European-transplant counterparts.

Looming over these other enemies is a nightmare, the one opponent that's Kovacs's undoubted equal — himself. The Harlan family has "double-sleeved" a computer-recorded copy of his personality, downloading a younger Kovacs into a customized "sleeve" (an empty body), and setting it to hunt and kill the original.

In this fictional universe, 500 years in our future, people switch their identities from body to body with a casualness nearly equal to our current-day attitude toward facelifts.

Brute violence loses some of its significance under these conditions, and that lends credibility to the gristle-popping, fluid-spewing, entrail-rich encounters between Kovacs and the rest of "Furies' " cast.

True, irreversible death's much rarer than the death of a mere sleeve; it's the result of accidental or deliberate destruction of one's implanted personality recorder, or "stack."

Because of this, true death takes on an added seriousness. This emphasis underscores the importance of Sylvie, the woman Kovacs spends most of the book protecting from the Harlans and their underworld allies.

Sylvie seems to harbor a second personality, the download of revolutionary Quellcrist Falconer, whose stack was vaporized along with her last known sleeve 300 years ago.

And Falconer, the only one who's ever posed a real threat to the Harlans, has returned, deploying a new weapon against them, a weapon they'll supposedly never be able to defeat.

The nature of this weapon comprises the novel's biggest flaw. Keyed to the ruling family's pheromones, Falconer's vengeance seems like a fury all too easy for the Harlans to escape — by simply resleeving into a body from different genetic stock.

Synthetic sleeves are available as well; Kovacs spends the book's first few chapters in one.

Reproduction would be problematic, but not impossible, since children as well as adults are shown fitted with stacks.

It's a tribute to Morgan's elegant, incandescent prose that this plot hole detracts only slightly from "Furies' " power. So much else is skillfully depicted, from Kovacs' painstakingly detailed yet dreamlike reconstruction of his double's awakening; to the virtual monastery where a retired insurgent grows mental poppies; to the skittering, self-aware armament abandoned on a continent too war-torn for human soldiers; to the final, oddly hopeful confrontation between Kovacs and his worst enemy.