Richard K. Morgan - Literary Career

Literary Career

In 2002 Morgan's first novel Altered Carbon was published, combining elements of cyberpunk and hardboiled detective fiction and featuring the anti-hero 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 It was originally written as a short story, then as a screenplay (both unpublished).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 has also been 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 now 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 (known in the USA as 'Thirteen') was released in May 2007 in the UK and June 2007 in the USA. According to the author, the book is about the constraints of physicality and the fact that you are locked into who you are and there's not a whole lot you can do about that. These are things he could not deal with in the Kovacs universe, because for Kovacs and people like him mortality is avoidable: you just skip into a new body. The novel subsequently won the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award.

Morgan's current project is a fantasy trilogy, 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 January 20, 2009 in the United States. The second volume, titled "The Cold Commands" was published in 2011. Additionally, Morgan worked with Electronic Arts and Crytek as 'Lead Writer' for their 2011 video game, Crysis 2.

Currently, working with Starbreeze to be a writer for their 2011 re-imagining of the original Syndicate.

His current writings feature heavily on the theme of autonomy in science fiction and escapism in fantasy.