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V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction's Secret Hyperdrive Fuel

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disatess
08/07/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
lets hope it`s not butchered like V for vendetta.
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BlueBeard
08/07/09

@disatess: The movie was better than the comic- there I said it.
As great as Alan Moore can be, he is by no means infallible. Yes, the glorious League of Extraordinary Gentleman was butchered into a nauseating, gooey pulp, but V for Vendetta was an improvement over the sometimes aimless and kind of dull book.
I'm excited to see more from the director that made V better than Alan Moore did. (never read this book, but I'm very curious now)
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Dominus Astra
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
Altered Carbon's plot was awesome and I must admit that I'm addicted to Morgan's work. That being said, the characters were cookie-cutter straw men that exist solely to deliver preachy sololiquical rants against many things (most of which is capitalism-related)
I can't still fathom the concept of the Envoy Corps. So they're badass elites specially trained to fight in any sleeve their minds beamed into. How? What sleeves? what if the bad guys just destroy the sleeve storage facilities, or simply turn of the needlecast installation?
Despite having only limited understanding of Japanese language and culture, Morgan keeps trying to shoehorn these elements into the novels. Fail.
Kovacs (and everybody else) is so angry and cussy, like, ALL the time. Every other sentence is fuck this and cunt that. Tiresome after five pages. Why is he so emo? I get it, broken family, dead comrades, corrupt bosses, battlefield massacre blah blah. But please! I yearn for a more stoic hero with the composure of somebody who's over 12.
That being said, I have high expectations for the movie, and if the director can at least mitigate some of my personal pet peeves above, I'll be happy. Sorry for my own emo rant.
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Rasselas
08/07/09

@Dominus Astra: I've often called Morgan's protagonists "petulant"; the trend reached a new peak in The Steel Remains, but Black Man was full of whiners, too. The fault isn't his alone, though: there are many writers who put Internet rants in characters' mouths.
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Chuck
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
Call me another one with mixed feelings; loved the Kovacs novels, but not a terribly big fan of the V for Vendetta movie.
I'd feel a lot better about it if it could be arranged for Kovacs himself to provide the consequences for a poor adaptation :-)
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Alex Mayo
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
It'll be cool to see how they work this out with several actors playing Kovacs; y'know, every time he switches sleeves.
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tetracycloide
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
there are few things that fill me with quite the same mixture of joy and worry as hearing altered carbon is being adapted for the big screen. it's not that i don't think it's filmable, an absurd notion really, it's that i fear the temptation to turn it into a cheap, summer blockbusting thrillride will be to great and the beauty that was the books noir style and tone will be lost in the translation.
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zerofritz
08/06/09

@tetracycloide: starring Will Smith as Takeshi Kovacs!
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braak: You are, as usual, completely correct.
08/06/09

@tetracycloide: Aw, man, it's so interesting, because the Morgan books would make a fascinating Blade Runner-style noir science fiction movie, and the whole "the same person in different bodies" thing would be such a treat to try and work on as an actor.
I mean, McTiegue is okay--he doesn't seem to shy away from non-blockbuster aspects of the work.
I'm curious, anyway.
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tetracycloide
08/06/09

@braak: v for vandetta certainly makes him a little promising. it's hard to say, really, because so much of his track record is colabrative efforts.

casting will be very difficult. i'm not sure who they're going to find that can pull off the interior monologues that kocacs' character will almost certainly require, much less how they're going to handle the resleaving thing visually.
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Edited by tetracycloide at 08/06/09 1:50 PM tetracycloide was starred tetracycloide was unstarred

alphanumeric1971
08/06/09

@tetracycloide: Interior monolgues did you say?
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Michael_GR
08/07/09

@alphanumeric1971: He's a perfect choice, but he might be afraid to be typecast as characters whose last name is Kovacs. That's very limiting!
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Dr Emilio Lizardo
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
Couldn't he just make it as an episode of Dollhouse?
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tetracycloide
08/06/09

@Dr Emilio Lizardo: the two aren't really at all similar in theme, tone, plot, style, or setting. but other than that, yeah it totally could!
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Dr Emilio Lizardo
08/06/09

@tetracycloide: Unfortunately, if you break anything down enough into component parts, all things start to look the same.

I knew that when I commented, but never let the facts get in the way...
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Edited by Dr Emilio Lizardo at 08/06/09 2:40 PM Dr Emilio Lizardo was starred

Marikir
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
I have to say that I did enjoy Altered Carbon. However, the rest of the series haven't quite captured the charge and energy I felt when reading the first. Probably could be a decent movie though. Not sure how the "cortical stack" concept will translate on film though. I guess if it gets made, we'll see.
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Rasselas
08/06/09

In reply to V for Vendetta Director Sets His Sights on Cyberpunk Noir
Morgan's subsequent works have changed AC's complexion for me: it is hard to remember how thrilling and interesting it was when Morgan's last few books have strayed so tediously into the didactic.
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tetracycloide
08/06/09

@Rasselas: the fight sequences at the end of woken furies are about as non-didactic as fiction gets.
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Rasselas
08/06/09

@tetracycloide: There were fight scenes? I must have fallen asleep during the second or third lecture about how ba religion is.
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ACurmudgeon
08/06/09

@Rasselas: what was his commentary on their mainstream success and depature of Gurewitz?
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tetracycloide
08/06/09

@Rasselas: you and i must have read different books because in the books i read kovacs was too buzy killing people, unraveling martian shit, getting high, and having sex to wedge in an entire lecture, much less two or three of them. still, different strokes i guess. morgan's examination of the power structure within the world he creates is like crack to me, crack not often found in even the most compelling of science fiction.
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Rasselas
08/06/09

@tetracycloide: I think too many liberal SFF fans flip their skirts for any mention of "class" or "power structure" in their leisure reading (or viewing). If our fantasies of power and freedom could be justified, then they wouldn't be very good fantasies.
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tetracycloide
08/07/09

@Rasselas: it's really got nothing to do with power fantasies. i like reading stories were the author has given more than a moment’s thought to what all the technology they're conjuring will actually do politically and socially. this means anything from Heinlein to Gibson to Morgan to Miéville.
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braak: You are, as usual, completely correct.
08/07/09

@tetracycloide: I just like the fact that, somehow in Richard K. Morgan's future world, the dominant culture of the upper-classes is improbably Haitian.
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Rasselas
08/07/09

@tetracycloide: I think we differ in our attitudes towards SF's much-adumbrated "what if"-ism. I think it's less an engine for imagination than a shibboleth and a stumbling block, as much as the airport thriller writers' emphasis on getting right the geography of Kowloon and the metallurgy of the SIG-Sauer P228, but I understand where you're coming from.
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RAHfanboy
12/02/08

In reply to Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction's Secret Hyperdrive Fuel
Parents, from personal experience, know that their children are far more likely to be influenced by sexual material than by violence. It's not a question of morality, so much as it is practical child rearing. Children will be risking pregnancy and STDs soon enough on their own, without watching thinly veiled pornography.

Europeans apparently have no problem with the idea of their adolescents having sex. but fear that they will become violent at the drop of a hat.
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Insomnia Bob
12/01/08

In reply to Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction's Secret Hyperdrive Fuel
Man has a point. It is telling, isn't it, that our culture is more at home with explosive decapitation than sexuality.
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OlavRokne
12/01/08

In reply to Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction's Secret Hyperdrive Fuel
Although Altered Carbon was a good romp, and the follow ups were fun, Thirteen just showed that Morgan is a bit of a one-trick pony. I'm a little tired of the more-masculine-than-any-other-man trope in pulp SF, and Morgan doesn't seem to have any other type of protagonist.

The problem with the sexuality in those books isn't the explicitness, but the fact that the romantic relationships are about as complex as those in Stephen Colbert's Tek Janzen Adventures.
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Rasselas
12/01/08

@OlavRokne: ...the more-masculine-than-any-other-man... trope in pulp SF....

There's a name for that sort of thing, but the name is sexist in that it implies that only women indulge in such wish-fulfillment.
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Rasselas
12/01/08

In reply to Sexual Repression Is Science Fiction's Secret Hyperdrive Fuel
Every Richard Morgan interview builds up to that "based on my own experience" climax, as though his critics were accusing his genetically-enhanced cyborg supermen of being far-fetched.
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