After finishing Broken Angels, I rolled right into part 3, Woken Furies. We follow Takeshi Kovacs again, in a more fulfilling finale than part 2. The book was still not as novel or exciting as Altered Carbon, but a fitting ending to the saga. I listened on Audible – a decent narration, but not the best I've heard.
Key Takeaways
Memorable Quotes
Rating: 7.5/10
A solid read, but again, not as good as Altered Carbon. Some more action and intrigue than Part 2 of the trilogy, but not a return to the murder mystery that I loved in Part 1. At this point, I'm tired of Kovacs and ready for something else!
Key Takeaways
- Power is never stagnant, it flows. It either concentrates in the few, or it diffuses to the many.
- The Fermi Paradox is tough to swallow.
- The potential for human enhancement through technology seems unlimited.
Memorable Quotes
- Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just reemerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, demodynamic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure.
- it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.
- Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant.
- Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash...
Rating: 7.5/10
A solid read, but again, not as good as Altered Carbon. Some more action and intrigue than Part 2 of the trilogy, but not a return to the murder mystery that I loved in Part 1. At this point, I'm tired of Kovacs and ready for something else!