Woken Furies
Richard Morgan### Amazon.co.uk Review
*Woken Furies* is Richard Morgan's third *noir* SF adventure starring combat veteran Takeshi Kovacs, who debuted in *Altered Carbon* (2002; winner of the Philip K. Dick Award). Kovacs operates in an interstellar future of extreme violence and exotic weaponry, where swapping bodies is as easy as trading in an old car.
The setting is Harlan's World, 95% ocean, where ancient alien orbital systems still vaporize anything that flies too high. Kovacs, older and madder, is running a private vendetta against Taliban-like fundamentalists whose principles--in a world where death is reversible--forced an old girl-friend and her child to die permanently. Wounded and on the run as usual, he escapes by joining a "deCom" squad hunting down human-built weapons systems that don't want to be decommissioned. Soon he's entangled with a woman who (some of the time) *seems* to be a reincarnation of long-dead revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer...
Meanwhile, the dictatorial ruling family of Harlan's World has set the deadliest possible assassin on Kovacs' trail--an illegal copy of his younger self, in a brand-new body.