It's the twenty-fifth century, and advances in technology have redefined life itself. A person's consciousness can now be stored in the brain and downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve"), making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Onetime U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Resleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.
This was one of those "How have you not read this yet?" recommendations, and I'm glad for it, because this was excellent.
Lots of really good characters, an engrossing whodunit, and enough speculation of the costs of post-humanity to make me REALLY wish some of my friends had been reading this along with me.
This was one of those "How have you not read this yet?" recommendations, and I'm glad for it, because this was excellent.
Lots of really good characters, an engrossing whodunit, and enough speculation of the costs of post-humanity to make me REALLY wish some of my friends had been reading this along with me.
It’s a juvenile male sex/power fantasy that drags out for hundreds of pages. That’s it. There are some interesting science-fictional ideas, but they're no more than window-dressing adorning mind-numbingly repetitive sequences of over-the-top violence, problematic sex, cardboard characters, clunky exposition, and a sludgy, meandering and incoherent plot. (The author is clearly of the school of thought that gratuitous sex and violence are “gritty” or "edgy" and therefore a substitute for narrative depth).
The protagonist is an utterly unlikeable Mary Sue with super-soldier training that only works when convenient for progressing the plot along, but is also constantly hand-waved away. He literally spends the entire book doing or saying things and then being like “Gosh my Envoy training really should have prevented me from doing that, I must be slipping.” The author continuously tells us how the protagonist is really smart, perceptive, etc. but in practice he’s …
This book is terrible!
It’s a juvenile male sex/power fantasy that drags out for hundreds of pages. That’s it. There are some interesting science-fictional ideas, but they're no more than window-dressing adorning mind-numbingly repetitive sequences of over-the-top violence, problematic sex, cardboard characters, clunky exposition, and a sludgy, meandering and incoherent plot. (The author is clearly of the school of thought that gratuitous sex and violence are “gritty” or "edgy" and therefore a substitute for narrative depth).
The protagonist is an utterly unlikeable Mary Sue with super-soldier training that only works when convenient for progressing the plot along, but is also constantly hand-waved away. He literally spends the entire book doing or saying things and then being like “Gosh my Envoy training really should have prevented me from doing that, I must be slipping.” The author continuously tells us how the protagonist is really smart, perceptive, etc. but in practice he’s a complete tool. (In a better book I would be willing to fridge-logic this as his own perception of himself being out-of-sync with reality, since the book is written in the first person, but I think that would be giving this one too much credit for self-awareness.)
One of the most cringe-worthy sex scenes was one in which the two participants were empathically-linked. That’s a super hot concept! It takes special skill to make it about as unsexy as day-old gym clothes, but somehow he manages it. Maybe it’s just because at that point I was already SO DONE with Kovacs' boner. Practically every chapter has pointless sexual stuff shoehorned into it even when it’s completely irrelevant to the story! I rapidly became totally sick of him mentally undressing every woman he met, and that’s ignoring the really problematic stuff, like the part where he creepily feels up the suspended-animation clone of his boss’ wife, or where he gets kidnapped and his captors put him into a woman’s body so that they can rape him. Not cool.
But the top reason for the scathing review: I have a special hatred for stories that introduce technological ideas that cause (or at least, should cause) people to grapple with interesting philosophical questions… and then proceed to utterly ignore said questions in favor of generic action movie tropes. It just makes me angry. You have all these cool ideas and then all you can do with them is construct an entirely unchallenging narrative in which our hero shoots a bunch of people and sleeps with women? You want me to buy that immortality has become something you can purchase, and people can body-swap at will, and yet society and people’s identities are pretty much the same as in a 1940s mobster flick?
There’s seriously an entire chapter describing in exhaustive, needless detail the protagonist shopping for guns. So that tells you basically all you need to know about this book.
No, wait. At some point in the book, the protagonist gets cloned, and then proceeds to have a conversation with his clone about his/their motivation and feelings and the plot thus far. They then go on to discuss his personal history, despite the fact that THEY ARE LITERALLY THE SAME PERSON and there is no reason whatsoever for them to need to talk about that!
THAT tells you all you need to know about this book. It's written in the first person, which provides the best possible way to show readers the protagonist's innermost thoughts, and yet the author is so bad at creating any kind of emotional depth that this conversation seemed like a good idea.
The entire book is full of boring, pointless scenes that serve as filler between the events of the generally uneventful plot, but the Kovacs vs. Kovacs conversation is pretty much the low point.
What I’d recommend you read instead: [b:The Peripheral|20821159|The Peripheral|William Gibson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402651292s/20821159.jpg|40167043], [b:Surface Detail|7937744|Surface Detail (Culture, #9)|Iain M. Banks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1287893375s/7937744.jpg|11345814], [b:Permutation City|156784|Permutation City|Greg Egan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1287341300s/156784.jpg|1270567].
I enjoyed this quite a bit. It's reminiscent of Neuromancer in the use of jargon that you'll just have to find out yourself. Takeshi is an interesting character that was fun to follow around. And I learned: just because you can upload yourself into "a stack" and get a new "sleeve" when the old one wears out, doesn't mean death is eliminated. I find the "Envoy" conditioning interesting but sometimes a little too convenient as a plot device. Nevertheless the hero has to suffer quite a bit until the - by then - not so surprising resolution at the end. I am currently reading the sequel (completely different story about Takeshi) which is a good sign.
The central idea of the book is great, that is, in the future we are able to transfer our minds into other bodies (sleeves) and that permanent death is not so common anymore. I enjoyed the world building, a kind of dystopian future where crime is everywhere and there are powerful corrupt people involved in government and security issues. The plot of the book starts well as Kovaks, the anti-hero protagonist is appointed to carry on an investigation about the supposed suicide of a very rich and powerful man. The plot slowly becomes very intricated, and I confess that by the end of the book everything seemed way to complex for me to grasp.
I was more interested in exploring the "humans as data" speculation than ticking off the noir essentials (hardbodied femme fatales, covered up depravities, a suffering gumshoe, etc), but the book gets around to all of it with solid writing. It may even manage to exaggerate a genre that embraces exaggeration to begin with.
A decent science fiction/noir thriller which is a little long, perhaps. The most interesting parts are the speculations about the role of human embodiment, rather than the more predictable plot.
Amazingly entertaining book. It's among the recent SF books that read like scripts for big Hollywood productions. I guess it shows what this generation of writers did when growing up. They use the language and images so many people in the Western world grew up with and consuming these books is extremely easy and a great pastime.
I heard about Altered Carbon in a discussion about real-life respawn. I immediately saved the book to my read list.
What I didn't expect was a book which discussed the subject lightly, while still being a great book and keeping me sticked to it 'till the end.
The book is about a future in which humans devise a method to store the human consciousness in an artefact which is implanted in to the base of the brain. With this, when you die, you could possibily be downloaded to a new body.
Enters Takeshi Kovacs, an Envoy who is hired by a very rich guy who thinks he didn't killed himself, and instead, was murdered.
To anyone who likes the cyberpunk genre, or the philosophical implications of being able to be downloaded to other bodies, a must-read.
I read this book some years ago, and re-read it this year. These days genre mashups are popular, but this was one of the first books to cross a hard-boiled detective with a science fiction world, and it works really, really well. The writing is good, the world-building is terrific, and there is plenty of action to propel the plot. If I had any complaints it would be that there's a few too many subplots, and things can get a little muddled, especially toward the end.
All the gore and sex felt juvenile to me. When you take those away you are left with an unoriginal and thin setting that was set up just as a backdrop for the gore and sex. This is of course entirely subjective, but it is the same I have felt with [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1477624625s/830.jpg|493634].
UPDATE 5 YEARS LATER: The TV series was awesome! Either I have become more "juvenile" in these years, or it's just a great series. I don't recall the book in sufficient detail, but from reading around online, the show has made a number of significant changes that may contribute to how much better I liked it.
Tough-guy one-liners feel cheesy in a novel. But on-screen with a deadpan delivery they work fantastically. "I know people like you." "There are no people like me.", "I don't care about her. Don't take it personally though: I don't …
All the gore and sex felt juvenile to me. When you take those away you are left with an unoriginal and thin setting that was set up just as a backdrop for the gore and sex. This is of course entirely subjective, but it is the same I have felt with [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1477624625s/830.jpg|493634].
UPDATE 5 YEARS LATER: The TV series was awesome! Either I have become more "juvenile" in these years, or it's just a great series. I don't recall the book in sufficient detail, but from reading around online, the show has made a number of significant changes that may contribute to how much better I liked it.
Tough-guy one-liners feel cheesy in a novel. But on-screen with a deadpan delivery they work fantastically. "I know people like you." "There are no people like me.", "I don't care about her. Don't take it personally though: I don't care about anyone." etc, etc.
Solid focus on the societal effects of the DHF technology. This must have been there in the novel, but I guess it was subtle enough for me to miss it. Or it could be that what felt cliche in a book feels fresh in a show because I've seen it in other books but not in other shows?
A lot of deviations in the show directly work to make Takeshi more relatable. (Ortega, Rei, Quell, Elliot, Poe I think all had lesser roles or connections to Takeshi in the novel.) While the show is plenty violent it's probably still much tamed compared to the book.
I almost rated this 2 stars. There were some parts I liked, and others I didn't. Particularly, I felt like sex was overused in the book. To me, it felt like it was used as an excuse to say "Hey, this is an ADULT book!!!" when instead, it took me out of the story. I really enjoyed the mystery aspect of this book, though that's not surprising since I'm a fan of mysteries.
I enjoyed Altered Carbon, but it was not the easiest read on the planet. This was Richard K. Morgan's debut novel, in what became an informal trilogy, and it shows.
It was my impression that quite often he was trying way too hard to achieve style points, over simply being true to his characters and telling the story.
If you enjoy William Gibson or Pat Cadigan, give Morgan's Altered Carbon a go. He has interesting ideas, but as I said you may have to wade through all of the showing off to get to them.
