Richard Morgan made his debut with the hard-bitten warrior and killer Takeshi Kovacs in Altered Carbon and Broken Angels – a buccaneer and private eye, tough, murderous and efficient, yet (in the best tradition) with a soft spot for damsels in distress and for society's unfortunates, for those ground down by the powerful and greedy. Morgan's vision of a dystopian future where half the galaxy is ruled by amoral faceless corporations is of course a commentary on contemporary affairs, as is all the best science fiction. Compelling, engrossing and satisfying, his Takeshi Kovacs novels have been a well deserved success.

There is a strong market for this sort of stuff: the Sten series by Chris Bunch and Alan Cole, for example, have been best sellers, with sales of well over a million in total. What is interesting is that while Chris Bunch's women are flat and characterless, mere sex objects wearing filmy scraps of nothing, whose sole purpose appears to be to submit to and pleasure men, Richard Morgan's are by contrast full and real, at least within the conventions of the noir private-eye novel.

Why do I say this is interesting? This is someone who clearly loves women yet, in his latest novel, The Steel Remains, two of the main protagonists are gay, as are some of the second-level characters. And they're far from stereotypes. Sten's heterosexuality is as flat and featureless as that of Samuel R Delaney's characters. Then again, Delaney had an excuse: he was gay. Bunch's descriptions of the sex between Sten and his cardboard-cutout women are formulaic and flat. The target audience, hormone-driven and insecure teenage boys, love the stories despite their obvious flaws. I know this because my own sons did (where did I go wrong?). You could perhaps – charitably – describe Bunch's male characters (the good guys, anyway) as homosocial but heterosexual, reflecting Bunch's own experiences in the armed forces in Vietnam. Not that different from most straight guys, perhaps.

Like Shakespeare (who was bisexual), Morgan's female characters in The Steel Remains are real, beautifully drawn, and far from the ciphers created by Bunch or Delaney. The gays in the novel are multi-layered and real, too. And he manages to write both gay and straight sex scenes which are completely convincing and very erotic (though in all his novels, the sex is incidental to the story). It's hard to write good sex, as anybody who has tried it will admit. It's altogether too easy to slip into purple prose, to provoke laughter instead of arousal. Morgan's prose here, as it is elsewhere, is entirely satisfactory and convincing. His portrayal of the love between Ringil and his various lovers is made more poignant by the undercurrents of loss and betrayal and sorrow. Not romantic love, but something deeper and richer and more complex.

The Steel Remains is a remarkable book. It leaps into action from page one with an introduction to Ringil Eskiath, our anti-hero, battling corpsemites. Ringil was once a great swordsman, a hero from the lizard wars. Now he's an outcast in a dreary provincial dorp. Ringil is as tough a warrior as Takeshi Kovacs. But he is gay – gay with bite. This is no effeminate stereotype, still often the only way straight authors can depict gay men. He's a totally macho, dark, ruthless killer, yet like Takeshi Kovacs he has (somewhere in him) a heart of gold. Just as Kovacs is betrayed by some of the people he loves and helps, so is Ringil, who reaps a terrible and heart-rending revenge at the end of the book. This is definitely not a romance. Yet it is nevertheless a story about love.

Egar the Dragonbane is a clan chief from the steppes. One can't help feeling that these are the steppes of our world, that he is the clone of two-thousand-year-old Scythians, carrying their tents on their backs; or Mongols, pitiless horsemen in thrall to their shamans and as fearful of afrits as they are fearless of men; or of Tartars, the fighting men saving an effete empire. Egar fought alongside Ringil during the wars, and ends up at his side again in this new struggle. He knows Ringil is gay, and it doesn't bother him. Morgan's description of the horsemen's culture and of the great steppes they inhabit is wonderfully done:

The sun lay dying amidst torn cloud the colour of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turning the persistent breeze chilly as it came. There's an ache to the evenings up here, Ringil had once said, shortly before he left. It feels like losing something every time the sun goes down.

Archeth, the third protagonist, an old friend of both Ringil and Egar, is a remarkable woman, an extraordinary and beautifully delineated portrait of a historic relic of the long ago past when things were different and her people ruled. She is, like Ringil, gay.

It's not quite clear whether it's fantasy or science fiction, a story set in the far future of our own world, or one set in a parallel world. Like all the very best sci fi, fantasy or historical fiction, the society and culture which underlies the story is not provided via a data dump, but as a subtle low-key process of asides and incidental information. Just as one example, it becomes clear as you read the novel that the moon is gone, perhaps pulverised in some cataclysmic conflict. It's a band of dust in the sky, and the author slips in sly references to 'bandlight' lighting up dark rooms. Of course, it could with equal plausibility be an orbiting band of dust, like those which ring Jupiter or Saturn. Either way, this is never made explicit. You are invited – obliged – to accept the reality of this society without dissecting or explaining away its existence and patterns by appeal to our own culture. Step by step, the author deftly draws the picture of an uncaring society, where the poor are ground down, where slavery has been recently reintroduced, where poverty is associated with lives nasty, brutish and short. Alien it is, but within itself the culture Morgan has created is consistent and coherent: yet another mark of an accomplished sci fi/fantasy author. Within this society, Ringil's morality is purely personal — loyalty to his friends and revenge to those who betray him. He is a man trying to be moral and decent in an immoral and decadent world.

In this culture, homosexuality is despised and viciously punished, and this is revealing, because Morgan could as easily have made it one where same-sex love and sex is entirely normal. After all, though we would like to think that our own culture is the norm, and therefore that gayness is at best disreputable and at worst evil and abominable, this is a unique obsession. Non-Abrahamic religions haven't in the past and on the whole do not now have this irrational hatred of what is a normal manifestation of the wide range of human sexuality. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, and more recently, actors in pre-Meiji Japan or in China had specific taboos within same sex relationships but no blanket taboo against gayness per se.

But clearly Morgan wishes to make a point. He has broken with convention by portraying Ringil as a tough, lethal, utterly male man, living in a society where, were it not for his aggressive strength and fighting prowess, he would be subject to the murderous punishments of the elite, who are hypocritical, greedy, thieving and immoral despite their high-minded hostility to homosexuality. And this is Morgan's message, dispassionately, icily, perfectly conveyed: being gay is not immoral. Being greedy, cruel, selfish, brutal and heartless, on the other hand, is. Daring to say that gayness isn't wrong will cost him. Already, some of the reviews on Amazon of The Steel Remains have lambasted him for having a gay hero, awarding the book just one or two stars because of this “crime”. You gotta love it.

But forget the message if you will. The novel is a triumph on its story, its characterisation, its scene building and its language. You should, even if you are straight (as I suspect the author is), be able to lose yourself in another world for a few hours of pleasure. Engrossing and thrilling, it will leave you with a melancholy when it's done, as perhaps all the best stories do.

The only cavil I have is that the point of view changes from chapter to chapter as each character takes centre stage. This is difficult to do well — you risk losing your reader— and Morgan hasn't quite succeeded. All the same, I highly recommend The Steel Remains. I think, if anything, this is a better novel than Altered Carbon or Broken Angels, because I feel that Morgan has had to reach further for his effects, and that struggle has improved the writing and deepened the characters. The way the novel ends suggests that there will be a sequel (though it is entirely satisfactory as a stand-alone story), which is good news. I'm looking forward to it. I grew fond of these cynical, damaged and flawed, yet ultimately likable characters.

 

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