loading . . . _Can Kovacs come out to play? Can Kovacs come out to play? Can he? Can he, please? Can he? Please! Can he?_
Irritating, right?
Well…………not so far.
I’ve heard it said that Conan Doyle got truly fed up with people asking him to bring back Sherlock Holmes. Don’t know if it’s true, apocryphal, or somewhere in between. All I can say is that if it _is_ true, he must have had way more fans and way more success than I yet do (and been considerably grumpier too). I get asked about another Kovacs book quite regularly, but all I take from it is the implied compliment of work well done. I mean, if my local gelateria made a shit flavour gelato, it seems unlikely they’d have a queue of people asking them when they were going to make some more. (Personally, I’m always checking in with them about the Amarena Cherry). You make something and people keep asking you to make more, you have to figure you did something right somewhere.
That said, your chances of getting any more Kovacs are about the same as me giving up Amarena Cherry gelato. Barring some emergency health issue, sorry guys, just don’t see it happening.
What’s triggered this? Well, someone (called Neil) asked under a previous post, and the way they phrased it was, I think, quite interesting.
_Is there any chance,_ Neil asked, _you will finish Kovacs’ story with a 4th book?_
Here’s the thing. I have always felt that the Kovacs arc _was_ finished with _Woken Furies._
_Altered Carbon_ sees Kovacs pretty much static in terms of character. What changes is his set of relationships with the other characters – he moves from detached and cynical to a weary kind of understanding, which enables him to do – approximately – the right thing by each person as he sees it. _Broken Angels_ takes him a step lower. It’s a book about nothing but survival. Even the few moral judgements he makes in _Altered Carbon_ are abandoned in favour of an understanding that _everyone_ in this situation, himself included, is culpable, and all you can hope for is to dodge the Fates, make it out alive, plus maybe carry a couple of chosen companions out with you. In sheer moral terms, _Angels_ marks a textbook example of Hollywood End of Act 2 nadir.
_Woken Furies_ finds Kovacs at that same nadir still – all he has is his Envoy conditioning and an implacable lust for vengeance. The book takes him from that lowest ebb to a confrontation with arguably his own worst enemy, himself, which he wins. _Furies_ leaves Kovacs with the closest thing he’s ever going to have to peace – a Cause, a reason to live, and something approaching Hope. That’s where I always intended to leave him.
I mean, sure, you could tell further stories about the man – he’s still alive, after all, pretty near indestructible with it, in fact! – but what would they be?
Story of the new Quellist revolution? I know that a lot of people expected me to deliver some kind of neat homily to Guevara-esque political change, in which Kovacs and the Quellists cast down the First Families , take Harlan’s World for their own, and a beautiful new day dawns for Quellist (read Socialist) Humanity.
But anyone who’s read my stuff with attention will know I don’t believe in that kind of thing – and reflecting this, neither does Kovacs or, really , even Quell herself! Quellcrist Falconer is an intensely conflicted individual. She barely had faith in her own political movement first time around, and is now carrying a huge weight of guilt for the way things turned out last time. There’s no doubt at the end of _Woken Furies_ that the Quellists will fight. But whether they have any hope of achieving their aims, or whether the cure will be worse than the disease is anybody’s guess. Kovacs is, in any case, only aboard on the basis of _It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive, let’s see how this goes_ , and even then his motives are at best ambiguous, with a strong admixture of the personal.
It is, of course, a truism that revolutions tend to deliver as many problems as they solve, and they habitually consume their own. That doesn’t make them bad stories, of course, there is all of human life in such a story. I suppose I could write a cast-of-thousands epic revolutionary space opera along those lines – or rather, someone like Kim Stanley Robinson or Kevin J Anderson could. But I’ve never been drawn to stories at that scale. The Kovacs books were each deeply intimate and deliberately small scale noir in tone – the story of one man, and a handful of involved secondary characters, dealing with the shit that societal structure throws their way. Even if I were to ever write a fourth book, it would have to somehow devolve back to that level, and wouldn’t be any kind of “completion” exercise.
Worse still, I have the horrible suspicion that such a book would be doomed to disappoint. It’s been twenty years since I wrote _Woken Furies_. A lot has changed in the interim, for me, for my readers, for the whole planet. Going back would feel almost like trying to steal something from my twenty years younger self – at best a kind of Tie-in Fiction effort, at worst, simple plagiarism. And readers are incredibly sensitive to such currents in writing – I think they would likely detect that discomfort in the work straight off and react accordingly. Any effort to ape the original books would be seen as recycled comfort zone product (goddamn it, even _Thin Air_ got accused of that, and it wasn’t even in the Kovacs universe!), and any attempt to take the franchise somewhere genuinely different likely wouldn’t scratch the same itch, in me or in the readership.
Like the cliche says – you take the bucket to the well one too many times…….
I mean – while we’re on cliches – Never Say Never Again, right?
But for now that bucket is staying right up on the shelf. I’ll see you all at the well, right enough, but while my receptacles may have some clear similarities in design, they will not be that one. https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2024/07/not-taking-the-bucket-to-the-well-again-is-a-revolutionary-act/
