Quellcrist Falconer

Quellcrist Falconer is the pen name of a fictional political activist/revolutionary often referred to in the Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard K. Morgan. She was born on Harlan's World, a planet settled via needlecast of stored personalities and clone banks sent conventionally through space .

Quellcrist wrote several books, most notably Poems and Other Prevarications and Things I Should Have Learned by Now. Her views ignited a revolutionary action against the ruling class of the planet, which is referred to historically as the "Un-Settlement". While believing all war is the result of unused male drive, and the over-accumulation of testosterone in men, her own actions and views led to a great deal of violent action.

Quellcrist was visionary in respects to the importance of "data-stacks" and the "resleeving" of consciousness with respect to revolutionary efforts. She proclaimed that the rebellion would prevail so long as its followers were patient - 20 years or 200 years, the difference is insignificant in the face of immortality.

She disappeared, and was subsequently presumed dead, following an attempt to escape from an overwhelming "Protectorate" force. She was last seen fleeing in a small helicopter with her pilot, and was assumed shot down by the 'orbitals' (aka orbital gun platforms, a web of active Martian relics surrounding Harlan's World.) These orbitals routinely disintegrate anything flying higher than 400 meters. The helicopter's disappearance and the lack of any wreckage indicated this was the fate that befell it.

In the first two books of the series Falconer is only referred to tangentially, as a historical figure, however in Woken Furies it is revealed that she was indeed shot down by the orbitals, but they did not kill her. The orbitals are discovered to be "digitizers" rather than contemporary weapons of destruction, and Quellcrist was stored in the orbitals' memory for over three hundred years. She was eventually downloaded into Sylvie Oshima, a woman whose profession in decommissioning AI hunters led to a large amount of computerized hardware linked to her consciousness. This caused a great deal of instability in the political structures of the planet, whose ruling class had re-established itself by that point.

Contents

Quotes

Quotes from Quellcrist are sprinkled throughout Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, though not all are attributed to specific works.

Sourced

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?
  • Poems and Other Prevarications
They come to me with
>Progress Reports<
But all I see is change and bodies burnt;
They come to me with
>Targets Achieved<
But all I see is blood and chances lost;
They come to me with
Choral fucking approval of every thing I do
But all I see is cost.

Unsourced

How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.
  • Dimitri Kadmin, on an upcoming fight.
Male-sleeved;
Stop up your hormones
Or spend them in moans
Of other calibre
(We'll reassure you – the load is large enough)
Blood-pumped
Pride in your prowess
Will fail you, fuck you
And everything you touch
(You'll reassure us – the price was small enough)
  • Takeshi Kovacs, on wars.

References