My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How have I not read this book before? The cyberpunk, the noir, and meticulous fight scenes all convince me Morgan and I’s teenage brains were marinated in very similar sauces. Fully-built worlds have been a bee in my bonnet lately, and here Morgan really succeeds: he takes the idea of consciousness being as transferable as any smartphone app and extends out the implications as far as they can go. All the permutations of data are included in interesting ways: copying, duplication, corruption and indefinite storage of the program called consciousness. A particular favourite was the method of torture of leaving someone in virtual reality with multiple copies of themselves until the existential dread cracks them open.

I’d say my only reservation is the Envoys, the interstellar ninjas the protagonist Takesi Kovacs was a part of. I understand keeping their ‘powers’ deliberately vague, but they seemed only to serve the immediate needs of the plot rather than have any real coherence. What Morgan does reveal of their work I found more intriguing than the main plot of the actual book. I wanted to read a book about life as an Envoy, what it would be like to be constantly moving from body to body and world to world, adapting and readapting but having no permanent body of your own.





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