In the past few years, Richard K. Morgan has attracted much acclaim with his novels ALTERED CARBON and BROKEN ANGELS, both featuring body-hopping detective/soldier/insurrectionist Takeshi Kovacs. After BOOKGASM’s Ryun Patterson filed his review of Morgan’s latest Kovacs novel – WOKEN FURIES – he talked to the man himself, about his work, the current state of science fiction literature and why he hates the SIN CITY and SPIDER-MAN movies so much.
BOOKGASM: Are you happy with this whole trilogy being wrapped up?
MORGAN: I try not to think of it as a trilogy. They’re three interlinked books, but in theory, you should be able to read each one as a standalone.
BOOKGASM: One’s a detective book, one’s a war book, they’re sort of different…
MORGAN: Yeah. Obviously the idea is that you buy them all, but that you can read them in sequence; there’s kind of a building knowledge of the characters in the scenarios as you go, but equally you could read them out of sequence and all that means is that when you read previous books you go, “Ah, right. That’s what that was about.” They’re standalone novels in theory, at least. As far as the Kovacs stuff’s concerned, I’m stopping now, but it’s not a Conan Doyle fount. I’m not throwing the guy off a cliff. I can’t think of anything to do with this character now that wouldn’t be a replica novel and therefore a bit of a rip-off.
Every series character I’ve ever read eventually gets old. You pick the new book up, you get it home and start reading it, and after awhile you go, “This just isn’t very good, is it?” I don’t really want to risk that. Rather than just keep churning the stuff out, I thought, “I can’t think of anything to do with Kovacs that’s fresh, so we’ll stop.” I’ll go away and do some other stuff, see how that goes, and then, if in a few years time I have an idea for another Kovacs novel that’s got something to offer, yeah, sure, I’ll go back and write another one; it won’t be a problem. But right now, I cannot see how I can do anything else with the character that wouldn’t just be retreading old ground, and I don’t like the feel of that. I feel like I’m not earning my money.
BOOKGASM: Why do you think the Kovacs book caught on in the first place?
MORGAN: I did what all serious writers will tell you what they do, in that they write for themselves. I was basically writing the stuff that I couldn’t find to read. I’d sort of been a big William Gibson enthusiast when I was younger. 
He did his NEUROMANCER trilogy and then he kind of started to lighten the mix and moved further away from the kind of noir-ish stuff and bring in a whole new dynamic. The other books are good novels, but I’d hoped that he’d do more with it; he seemed to be mining something that was really cool. I was looking round and I couldn’t find anyone who was doing it as well as he’d done it, and so it was just “well, that’s what I want to read, so that’s what I’m going to write.”
BOOKGASM: But your style is set apart from that 1980s cyberpunk literary style.
MORGAN: I think the similarities are that Gibson was mining the noir genre at the beginning, and that’s certainly what I’ve done as well. I’m a big fan of the American crime-writing tradition, everything from Raymond Chandler right up to guys like James Ellroy and Robert Bloch. It always seemed to me that this was very powerful, this kind of aesthetic, and you could import it very successfully into science fiction. I’d seen Gibson do it.
BOOKGASM: A lot of people have done it really badly as well.
MORGAN: There’s always the risk. I guess there were a lot of people like me who were also out there looking for this and hadn’t been supplied with it up to that point. I think also maybe that the sheer iconoclasm of the whole thing, in that Kovacs, over the course of three books, has developed into almost a force of nature, and there’s no attempt to soften the edge on who he is. I don’t believe in apologizing for my characters, and I think that maybe appeals as well.
I once remember I was at a book meeting in Britain, over crime novels in this case, and the conversation got around to what noir was exactly, and then this guy in the audience, just out of nowhere, says, “Maybe noir is the antithesis of Disney,” and I thought that was brilliant. That’s as good a definition of what noir is as I’ve ever heard. Disney basically tells you it will all be all right in the end – just keep your nose clean, pull your weight, do the right thing and it will all work out. Exactly the opposite is saying to you, “Bad things happen. Being good is no protection. You try to survive and you hope that somehow, some goodness survives the damage of the process of living.”
I shy away from the whole Disney trip. I find it rather unhealthy. I went to see the SPIDER-MAN movie and didn’t like it; 
I almost walked out of the second SPIDER-MAN movie just because I was so sick of the kind of mawkish, saccharine goodness about it. (In Aunt May voice:) “Oh, there’s a little bit of a hero in all of us.” That is old. That is dead in its grave. What really surprised me was how successful those movies were. My feeling, while I was watching them, was, “I can’t see how this is going to wash.” And it did. It obviously did strike a very deep chord for a lot of people. But I wasn’t one of them.
BOOKGASM: Do you remember the first science fiction book you ever read?
MORGAN: Not really, no. I read quite a lot of Isaac Asimov when I was very young – 10, 11 years old. The first one where I could sort of define and say, “Wow, this one I really like” was a Poul Anderson collection, some of his Flandry short stories. Those really blew me away. It was the first time I’d come across – in the sci-fi genre – sort of flawed and messy human characters. Anderson’s very good, especially in his early writing career, on blurring the lines between the good guys and the bad guys, making it all very muddy. It was such a great step forward from what I had been reading.
BOOKGASM: It seems like adults are more willing to let kids read science fiction than other types of fiction that has the same mature kind of subject matter, just because there’s a robot on the cover.
MORGAN: I think the whole thing about sci-fi is that it’s got the real tinge of a young person’s genre about it simply because it’s all about possibility. When you are 10, 12, 15, 18, even 20 years old, that’s really what your whole life is about. It’s all possibility because you’ve not done it yet. In that sense, it’s obvious why it speaks to young people. I think the trick is to try to hang on to that readership as they get older and their perspectives change. You can do it, but you’ve got to have a willingness to tarnish the original material. Increasingly that’s possible now.
I think when I was initially trying to write back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there wasn’t much room for that, certainly in terms of the movies that were being put out. You could never have got a movie like MINORITY REPORT made back then. It would have just been too dark. I think that was to some extent reflected in the publishing world as well. The short story that MARKET FORCES was based upon was rejected by INTERZONE, and the guy wrote back and said, “I like the way you write. You write well, but I couldn’t sympathize with any of these selfish yuppie characters.” And your point is? At that time, there wasn’t a lot of receptiveness to that approach. And I think things have turned around, and over the last five or maybe even 10 years, people are far more willing to buy into this very dark vein within the genre, and profess to take it seriously.
Gibson is now the Grand Old Man of the genre. He’s no longer this fresh, cutting-edge cyberpunk, but he is still on the cutting edge of what sci-fi is doing. He is an eminence grise now, and that’s a remarkable turnaround.
BOOKGASM: He’s writing his books, Bruce Sterling is writing techno-thrillers, and Neal Stephenson is writing 1,000-page histories of economics.
MORGAN: Yeah. In that sense, that’s one of the things I like: There’s no doubt the genre’s definitely coming of age now. I think we’ve all been saying this for ages, but I really do think it’s coming of age because it’s beginning to broaden. As you say, (Gibson’s) PATTERN RECOGNITION, well, what was that exactly? Was it science fiction? I don’t know. No one’s quite sure what it was, but it’s definitely within the canon, and it’s been dissected, it’s been critiqued and so forth. The Stephenson books, again, what are these? The genre’s doing the thing that I think always prevented it from being taken seriously. It is actually putting down roots in new places, It’s prepared to go out there and do new stuff.
BOOKGASM: Taking the robots off the covers.
MORGAN: Exactly. I think it was always in the past, everyone was going, “Oh, no one takes us seriously.” And then when you looked at the people who were saying that and what they were almost exclusively reading, it was like, “Yeah, why do you think that is?” It was so much a ghetto mentality. It was, “Oh, look, poor us, shut away in this literary ghetto.” But nobody wanted to venture outside the ghetto. You’ve got to go halfway at least. That’s finally happening – when I say finally, I mean not this year; it’s been going on for a couple of years now.
BOOKGASM: Who are your favorites right now?
MORGAN: Jeff Vandermeer I’m really keen on because he’s kind of experimental. I’m reading Kelly Link; I’m a big fan of hers – again, it’s this very odd stuff, very strange. Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
BOOKGASM: Oh, yeah. He’s one of the reasons I’m really angry about the whole UK-U.S. publishing delays. His newer stuff still isn’t out over here. And your newest book was like six months later than in the UK.
MORGAN: Yeah, but they’re closing my gap, though. They are determined to close that gap.
BOOKGASM: With all this talk about noir, have you seen SIN CITY?
MORGAN: Yeah, I think I must be in the minority. I thought it was dreadful. Very rarely have I been so close to walking out of a movie. And I’m a fan of the books. I’ve got three of them at home, and my first graphic novel ever was THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. I’m a fan of Miller’s work. I’d already heard intonations from a few people that it wasn’t going to be very good. I went to see it, and yeah, for the first three minutes, I was thinking, “Wow! This is cool!”
And then it was like, okay, take this somewhere. I felt that it was a huge mistake to allow that much editorial control to Miller and to do this kind of homage. Rodriguez kind of gets down on his kneees and licks this guy’s ass, and I just think that was a big mistake. You could have made a very credible movie out of the material, but for chrissake, you need to make a movie, not make a moving graphic novel. I was just bored rigid for almost all of it.
It just degenerated into such a mess. It actually made me re-evaluate the graphic novels. I kind of went home from the movie theater thinking, “Shit, maybe they’re not that good. Maybe I’ll throw them out.” One of the things that hit me very, very palpably was this extremely unpleasant sexism running through certainly the middle story. This idea that here they are – these stunningly beautiful, sharp, smart tough women – and what do they want to be? They want to be prostitutes.
I took my wife as well, and I told her she probably wasn’t going to like it, but she came with me anyway, and I said, “I guess if you’re a woman that was pretty offensive, right?” and she goes, “Yep.” I actually was going home looking back through them thinking, “Well , shit, maybe this was a pile of sexist shite, and I didn’t spot it.” And it don’t think it was. I haven’t read THE BIG FAT KILL, but THAT YELLOW BASTARD I still like. I still think it’s got a lot of power.
It’s kind of like Soviet revolutionary art. These huge, blocky figures. And you really don’t take them very seriously. You’re looking at these graphic novels, and it’s one, maybe two frames per page, so you’re looking at it in the same way you look at this poster of this archetypal worker with a great big hammer in his hand. And it works; it has a type of power. But once you take that down and actually put it in motion, it then becomes ridiculous. There are lines in that movie that are so cringeworthy. The bit where she says, “Kill him for me, Marv.” And you’re just going, “Nooooo!” In any other circumstances, someone in the machine would have said, “That line has to come out.”
Film is not comic books, in the same way that comic books are not prose novels. It’s a different medium and it requires a different approach. This kind of fanboyish insistence that we’re going to touch nothing, we’re going to leave it the way it is – it ruined what potentially they could have done a lot with. It’s bizarre. This film has pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes to an incredible extent. It’s basically convinced everyone that it’s brilliant, when the actual truth is even when the sort of people who’ve said they liked it, if they sit down and actually break it down, they go, “No, actually, you’re right. It’s not good.” And I think it’s a great shame.
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