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.
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 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.
An excellent look into a Science Fiction future. It combines some of my favorite parts of Detective Stories, Noir, and Transhumanism.
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.
