ramblings about takeshi kovacs

Takeshi Kovacs is the main character of Richard K. Morgan's first two works of fiction. The first was Altered Carbon and the second Broken Angels. The major category they fall into is SciFi. But the first one is really influenced by Noir, and so gets the sub-genre of Future Noir. Lovely! The second on is more straight SciFi, with some aspects of noir, but not enough to call it such. The main new idea in these books is that "real death" is usually avoided since human consciousness (memories, intellect, etc) has been digitized into a little drive, called a stack, which sits at the base of your skull. So when your body, or sleeve dies, your stack is downloaded into a new sleeve. nifty, but a bit trying. So Tak lives life after life, first as a regular maruading teenager and then as a member of the elite military group, the U.N. Envoys.

But the real question is, what is so appealing about Takeshi Kovacs? He's got ultimate control over his physical being, plus he always seems to have on a sleeve that has extra bits of perception via neurochemical enhancement. He doesn't stick to one body and Morgan isn't really into heavy description of his main character (the 2nd book only tells us that he's in an afro-caribbean sleeve). He's smart, but not thaaaat smart. I'm thinking that maybe it's power. Perhaps I am attracted to the idea of such a powerful person. He can manipulate people, read their emotions, tell if they're lying, lie, separate himself from reality to get shit down, etc. My other potential vein of thought was that he is knowledgeable and educated (about politics/war/violence/psychology), but he shirks all responsibility to act because of that knowledge or ability.

ahhh a powerful man who isn't driven to responsible. is that it?