Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

[lightreads]

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The misplaced titles game: Broken Angels ought to be the title of some rancidly sweet early twentieth century morality tale of former prostitutes finding God in a halfway house. In reality, it’s a psychopathically violent pseudomilitary skiffy tale of humans mucking about in the remains of the long-gone Martian civilization; the entire main cast spends about two-thirds of this book dying in agony from radiation sickness, and the remaining third poking into their consciences and not liking what they find. It’s actually pretty funny in places.



Okay, sold. I liked this psychological splatterfest quite a lot. It’s perhaps the first book I’ve ever read that successfully conveyed the wonder and existential horror of finding yourself a tiny wriggling human in the remains of a civilization millions of times older and wiser and more advanced.



And the more important thing: like Altered Carbon, this is a book about people as meat. Meat that panics and fights and fucks and dies. Meat that thinks, sure, and connects, and cares. But the thinking is just nerve impulses moving fast enough to get a tiny bit meta on themselves, and the connection’s just an evolutionary necessity. This is a series whose protagonist has rewired his empathy and emotional reactions so much that he can really get at the truth of what he is: thinking meat.



And the reason I think that’s cool is that it’s fucking cool. All those people – including scientists, and it’s a surprising lot of them – who believe in an animist theory of consciousness are missing the point, I think. Because if you pin these guys down and say, “okay, but why do you really think there’s some ethereal unmeasurable thing that is us? Why isn’t it just nerve impulses?” They’ll squint at you and say, “well, there has to be. I mean, it can’t just be nerve impulses, how is that possible?”



I think a lot of animists are animists for the sensawunda. The way to be amazed at how unbelievably cool we are. And I think that’s missing the point. You think some woo-woo force field you can’t see or measure or explain or even agree on naming is cool?



I think it’s the other way around. I think the fact that our consciences and empathy and dreams are just nerve impulses is amazing. That gets my sensawunda going like nothing else ever has or probably will. I mean, existential awareness arising out of biology. How does it do that? That is the most incredible thing.



Um, anyway. Needless to say, Richard K. Morgan is not an animist. And his crunchy skiffy is all about this stuff, under the blood baths and the space horror. And I really dig that.





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