Portalul ingerilor

How quickly style can turn to crutch, spicy phrases turn into tics, and a streetwise narrator turns into your cranky coworker that keeps coming around to complain to you! I really liked Altered Carbon, but it seems like maybe one was enough. This time around, I can't unhear the way that wildly different characters rely on the same cliches, and the way that a post-biology post-human world opens up space for Morgan to describe human racial/ethnic characteristics in a really creepy colonial pseudo-scientific way. Also, unforgivable for a pulpy novel, really really boring. Boo! I was really expecting to like this one.

“You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe.”

So, I really liked the first book in this series when I read it last year. Sci-fi! Cyberpunk! Murder mystery! Detective noir stuff! All of that hit just the right notes with me, and I really appreciated the psychological spin the author put on the whole concept of resleeving. I was excited to pick up this book!

But then I discover that it's its own thing. Completely stand alone. And not even involving mysteries. Way more sci-fi, way more (unnecessary) sex. I thought the meat of the book was interesting, but I also felt like all the sex scenes in this one weren't quite necessary to advance the plot any. They just seemed like (un)interesting diversions the author wanted to go on while writing this book. Like if Morgan's editor was really Shatner, and he was whispering in Morgan's ear about sci-fi sex selling in entertainment media.

Also. There was. Another thing that bothered me in this book. I. Don't exactly know how to describe it. Except that it involved lots of periods instead of proper punctuation. Like ellipses. Or. Commas. No. Instead we get. Paragraphs like these where the speaker would pause in the middle of a sentence. For effect. And then a new sentence would start up with the rest of their thought. It was. Super distracting. And kind of unnecessary. I'm not a writer. But I feel like I could write better sentence structure.

Still, I gave this book 3 stars, if only because I (still) really like the premise behind this series and the sci-finess of it all. The story was entertaining enough, if a little basic when compared with the plot and twists of the first book. I was still glad to have read it, but am hoping the third book recaptures a bit of the magic of the first for me.

Le deuxième épisode des aventures de Takeshi Kovacs est très différent du premier. Après le mélange de science-fiction et de roman noir dans Altered Carbon, nous avons affaire ici à un roman de guerre mêlé d'aventure archéologique.

C'est plutôt bien fait, même si j'ai regretté quelques longueurs à plusieurs moments du récit. J'ai trouvé ce deuxième roman un peu mieux réussi que le premier, peut-être parce qu'il innove moins et que le genre sur lequel il s'appuie (le roman de guerre) me plait moins a priori.

L'auteur en profite tout de même pour étendre la mythologie de son univers de science-fiction, et livre surtout une description parfaite de la guerre et de ce que cette expérience représente pour les combattants et les civils.

Je me demande quel style et quel genre sera revisité dans le troisième volume de cette saga. Je le saurai sans doute très vite :-)