Review: Voice of the Whirlwind

 I’m generally a fan of Walter Jon Williams. His worlds are quite well constructed, and his characters interesting, many quite nuanced. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in his Cyberpunk universe. The protagonist, Steward, is a highly trained super soldier fanatic who’s brought back to life after his Alpha (the original) died. Apparently, the brain backups weren’t made frequently, so he has a memory gap and has to figured out what his Alpha was up to when he died.

If this sounds very familiar, it’s because Richard Morgan’s much more successful Altered Carbon had a similar setup. What made Morgan’s book more successful? First, Takeshi Kovacs narrates the novel, which makes the entire voice and presence much more immediate and visceral. Secondly, Morgan’s style is much better: rather than trying to be cyberpunk, Morgan went for a Raymond Chandler cynical hardboiled attitude.

Finally, while Stewart seems devoice of passion, Kovacs is nothing if not passionate, even if cynical.

The world that Williams introduces is complex, but there’s a lot of explicit exposition that has to happen for you to “get it.” The initial setup takes too long, and while the action goes fast once Stewartd figures out what happened, because of the third person narrative, you never understand why he should have cared in the first place.

To be fair, Williams wrote this book many years before Richard Morgan wrote Altered Carbon. I think it suffered from too much cyberpunk and its datedness shows.