Woken Furies

Richard K. Morgan, 2005, Sci-fi

The third Takeshi Kovacs novel finds Kovacs on his home planet of Harlan's World, looking for an old girlfriend and shooting a bunch of religious fanatics. He gets a job decommissioning old semi-sentient military hardware. Then he finds out that one of his co-workers is possessed, haunted, or influenced by a famous revolutionary figure named Quellcrist Falconer who's been dead for hundreds of years. Naturally, this means that the only logical thing for Kovacs to do is to get some of his ex-military buddies and attempt to topple the oppressive oligarchy that controls Harlan's World.

Okay, I wouldn't try that, but as an action-adventure story, it mostly works. Critical and fan reaction to this book was lukewarm. That's too bad, since the book is well-written and has a number of interesting ideas in it in addition to the Cool Stuff Blowing Up. It could've been about 10% shorter without losing anything important, and as in Altered Carbon, some of the characters aren't that believable.