December 16, 2008

• Have you ever been in love with a fictitious character?

  The best thing about loving fictional guys is that I can love as many of them as I want and they don’t get jealous.  The worst thing about them is that they are not real.

  The more I think about this, the more I tend to think that these fictional men I love are really not real.  I mean that they are very much unlike any real men I know.   It is also pretty obvious, from the type of fictional men I have bonded with, that I have some disturbingly unhealthy appetites.

  One of the first fictitious men I fell for was “salvage consultant” Travis McGee, written by John D. MacDonald.  As described in the books, if McGee had been a few inches taller, he would have looked just like my father.  That might account for the attraction, I suppose.  I think I’m over him, now, anyway.  I have changed over the years, but old McGee stays the same.

  Lazarus Long, the immortal time traveler written by Robert A. Heinlein, didn’t appeal to me much when I first met him, even before I knew McGee.  He grew on me, I guess, as I grew.  Come to think of it, I don’t think I have ever fallen for a character on the basis of a single book.  All the ones I’m mad about exist in series and have shown real character development with time.  Shoot me if I ever “get over” Laz.  My love for him is, as it should be, as deathless as ol’ Laz himself.

  I didn’t think much of Jack Reacher in Echo Burning, the first of Lee Child’s novels I ever read.  But another of his books came my way, I read it, and I was hooked.  I have searched out every blessed book in the series, read them all, and have placed pre-publication orders for the last two, my most serious $$$ splurge in many years.  It is a budget violation I cannot justify, and I won’t even try.  I’m in love.

  Not long after I met Reacher, along came Joe Pike.  At first, he was just the quietly dangerous sidekick of Robert Crais’s private eye, Elvis Cole.  Then Crais apparently realized what he had there and wrote a book, The Watchman,  for Joe.

  Now I have fallen in love again.  This guy is as immortal as Lazarus Long (providing nobody blows out his cortical stack), even more enigmatic and dangerous than Joe Pike, and, damnit, not one bit more tangible or here than any of the others.  His name is Takeshi Kovacs.  He is written by Richard K. Morgan.

  In all honesty, I’m not as fascinated with Kovacs as I am with the universe Morgan has created.  He does such an excellent and seamless job of putting readers into strange cultures with alien technologies, without any tedious exposition, that he has gained three avid fans here in Doug, Greyfox and me.  Our tastes ordinarily differ so markedly that Greyfox was led some time ago to remark that anything all three of us like has to be good.

  Richard K. Morgan is better than good.  His most interesting character, Quellcrist Falconer, is not physically present in Altered Carbon or Broken Angels.  She is there, though, a remembered, revered, ridiculed and reviled revolutionary leader existing only in quotes such as:

  Is it a wolf I hear,
  Howling his lonely communion
  With the unpiloted stars,
  Or merely the self-importance and servitude
  In the bark of a dog?

  How many millennia did it take,
  Twisting and torturing
  The pride from the one
  To make a tool, The other?
  …
  And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit?
  And who do we find to blame?

  and

  The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference – the only difference in their eyes- between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

  I understand that she will be revived in the flesh, resleeved, in Woken Furies.  I’m giving it to myself for Christmas.

  • 5:19 pm
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