Richard K. Morgan

Richard Kingsley Morgan
Morgan in Zagreb at SFeraKon, 2008
Born	September 24, 1965 (age 58–59) London, England
Occupation	Writer
Genre	Hardboiled, postcyberpunk, Science fiction, fantasy
Spouse	Virginia Gema Cottinelli-Herrero
Children	Daniel Morgan Cottinelli
Parents	John Morgan (father), Margaret Morgan (mother)
Website
www.richardkmorgan.com

Richard Kingsley Morgan, known as Richard K. Morgan in the U.S., (born September 24, 1965) is a British science fiction and fantasy author.

Morgan's books are generally set in a post-extropianist dystopian world. Morgan described his "takeaway" of one of his books as:

Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a wilful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the majority whom the system oppresses.

Early life and education

Born in London, and brought up in the village of Hethersett, near Norwich, Morgan studied history at Queens' College, Cambridge. After graduating he started teaching English in order to travel the world. After 14 years and a post at the University of Strathclyde, his first novel was published and he became a full-time writer. He lived in Glasgow until 2015, when he moved to Saxlingham Nethergate with his wife Virginia and their son Daniel.

Literary career

In 2002 Morgan's first novel Altered Carbon was published, combining elements of "cyberpunk" and hardboiled detective fiction and featuring the antihero Takeshi Kovacs. The film rights for the book sold for a reported figure of $1,000,000 to film producer Joel Silver, enabling Morgan to become a full-time writer. In 2003 the U.S. edition received the Philip K. Dick Award.

In 2003 Broken Angels was published, the sequel to Altered Carbon, again featuring Takeshi Kovacs and blending science fiction and war fiction in a similar way to his cross-genre début.

Market Forces, Morgan's first non-Kovacs novel, is set in the not-too-distant future. It was originally written as a short story, then as a screenplay (both unpublished). After the success of his first two works, it was released as a novel and optioned as a film.

Morgan's third, and he has stated final, Kovacs novel Woken Furies was released in the UK in March 2005 and in the U.S. in September 2005.

Morgan wrote two six issue miniseries for Marvel Comics under the Marvel Knights imprint. His first story, Black Widow: Homecoming published monthly in 2004 was followed by a second, Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her published monthly in 2005; both are available in collected editions. According to Morgan's official website the series was "an artefact of limited appeal" and is unlikely to be continued, although he has other comic projects in development.

Black Man was released in May 2007 in the UK and in June 2007 in the United States (as Thirteen or Th1rte3n). According to the author, the book is about the constraints of physicality and the fact that people are locked into who they are. These are things he could not deal with in the Kovacs universe, because for Kovacs and people like him mortality is avoidable: they just skip into a new body. The novel won the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Morgan wrote a fantasy trilogy with a gay protagonist, A Land Fit for Heroes, the first volume of which has the title The Steel Remains and was published in August 2008 in the UK and on 20 January 2009 in the United States. The second volume, titled The Cold Commands was published in 2011. The third book in the series is called The Dark Defiles and was published on 17 August 2014.

Liber Primus Games is creating a gamebook series based on the A Land Fit For Heroes trilogy. The first game was published for Android, Apple and Amazon Kindle Fire devices on 4 November 2015.

In 2008, he worked with Starbreeze as a writer for Syndicate, the 2012 re-imagining of the 1992 original. Additionally, Morgan worked with Electronic Arts and Crytek as lead writer for their 2011 video game, Crysis 2.

In October 2018, Morgan's science fiction novel, Thin Air was published in the UK by Gollancz.

In an interview before the launch of Thin Air, Morgan described a common feature of his works:

There is a central conceit that I keep — not consciously, I swear! — returning to in my work. It takes different metaphorical guises, but at root it’s always the same sense of something grand and worthwhile being abandoned by vicious and stupid men in favour of short-term profit and tribal hegemony. You see it in the regressive politics of the Protectorate in the Kovacs novels, the way both the Yhelteth Empire and the — so-called — Free Cities fail their duty as civilisations in A Land Fit for Heroes. So also with Thin Air — the landscape is littered with the markers of a retreat from the grand scheme of terraforming and building a home for humanity on Mars, in favour of an ultraprofitable corporate stasis and an ongoing lie of highly emotive intangibles sold to the general populace in lieu of actual progress.

A graphic novel titled Altered Carbon: Download Blues, which continues to follow the character Takeshi Kovacs, was released in July 2019.

Bibliography

Takeshi Kovacs novels

• Altered Carbon (2002) ISBN 0-575-07390-X
• Broken Angels (2003) ISBN 0-575-07550-3
• Woken Furies (2005) ISBN 0-575-07325-X
• Altered Carbon: Download Blues (2019) ISBN 978-1524109677

A Land Fit For Heroes

• The Steel Remains (2008) ISBN 0-575-07792-1
• The Cold Commands (2011) ISBN 0-575-07793-X
• The Dark Defiles (2014) ISBN 0575088605

Black Man novels

• Black Man (2007) ISBN 0-575-07513-9 (known as Thirteen or Th1rte3n in the United States ISBN 0-345-48525-4)
• Thin Air (2018) ISBN 9780575075146

Other novels

• Market Forces (2004) ISBN 0-575-07584-8

Graphic novels

• Black Widow: Homecoming (2005) ISBN 0-7851-1493-9
• Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her (2006) ISBN 0-7851-1768-7
• Altered Carbon: Download Blues (2019) ISBN 978-1524109677

Video games

• Crysis 2 (2011)
• Syndicate (2012)
• A Land Fit For Heroes (2015)

Music

• "Woken Furies" from the album Dark All Day by Gunship (2018)

Scandals

On 19 December, 2019, Morgan became part of a scandal for a tweet supporting controversial statements from author J.K. Rowlings which have been seen as transphobic by the transgender community and others.

External links

• Official website
• Richard Morgan at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Interviews

• Science Fiction Weekly interview
• JIVE Magazine interview
• InfinityPlus interview
• Morgan Week interviews and reviews
• An interview for the Italian fans
• Interview Clarkesworld Magazine 2008-9
• Interview on the SciFiDimensions Podcast