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annathepiperThis novel was recommended to me a while back by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cafiorello, and Cathy, I must now thank you profusely for that recommendation. This was a kickass novel.
Very gritty, almost brutal, with crosses and double-crosses all throughout its complex plot, Altered Carbon is a very violent sort of book set in an intriguing future where humanity has invented technology capable of storing your entire consciousness in a "stack"--and therefore rendering the physical body nothing more than a sleeve which can be changed. For most of humanity, this is a luxury they're lucky to afford once. For the rich and powerful, though, body sleeves can be changed as readily as their clothes. And for these people, death has been rendered effectively meaningless. For Takeshi Kovacs, former member of a paramilitary force called the Envoys and now a criminal sentenced to spend over a hundred years "on stack", waking up in a new sleeve comes with a hefty price: he has to find out why Laurens Bancroft, one of the most powerful men on Earth, was murdered. The police think he committed suicide. Bancroft, whose consciousness has been brought right back out of remote backup and installed in a fresh new sleeve, swears otherwise. He hires Kovacs to get to the bottom of it, and pretty much right of the gate, Kovacs starts cutting a swath through Bay City on his way to the truth.
I'm impressed as hell with Morgan as a writer--because while I never found Kovacs particularly admirable (certainly the man is damn near a psychopath himself and has a long and bloody history which comes back to haunt him at salient points in the plot), I still nevertheless was sucked into rooting for him as he got closer and closer to the truth. Furthermore, I damn near wanted to cheer that Morgan, even as he had his characters throw out random bits of slang dialogue in the course of their conversations, never once went out of his way to try to clue in the reader as to what these terms were supposed to mean. He does the reader the courtesy of assuming that she will be smart enough to figure it out. And I love that.
And the whole concept of moving a person's entire consciousness around between bodies was highly intriguing, too. Morgan does an excellent job of laying out how this has changed society, not only socially but in terms of religion as well. As a fan of the new BSG, though, I had to giggle and giggle at the very first chapter where he wakes up in his new body--because anybody who's seen the Season 2 BSG episode "Downloaded" will find the tank in which he wakes up very familiar. ;) "ZOMG HE'S A CYLON" kept going through my head through much of the book.
Highly recommended for a hard SF read. Four stars!
cafiorello, and Cathy, I must now thank you profusely for that recommendation. This was a kickass novel.Very gritty, almost brutal, with crosses and double-crosses all throughout its complex plot, Altered Carbon is a very violent sort of book set in an intriguing future where humanity has invented technology capable of storing your entire consciousness in a "stack"--and therefore rendering the physical body nothing more than a sleeve which can be changed. For most of humanity, this is a luxury they're lucky to afford once. For the rich and powerful, though, body sleeves can be changed as readily as their clothes. And for these people, death has been rendered effectively meaningless. For Takeshi Kovacs, former member of a paramilitary force called the Envoys and now a criminal sentenced to spend over a hundred years "on stack", waking up in a new sleeve comes with a hefty price: he has to find out why Laurens Bancroft, one of the most powerful men on Earth, was murdered. The police think he committed suicide. Bancroft, whose consciousness has been brought right back out of remote backup and installed in a fresh new sleeve, swears otherwise. He hires Kovacs to get to the bottom of it, and pretty much right of the gate, Kovacs starts cutting a swath through Bay City on his way to the truth.
I'm impressed as hell with Morgan as a writer--because while I never found Kovacs particularly admirable (certainly the man is damn near a psychopath himself and has a long and bloody history which comes back to haunt him at salient points in the plot), I still nevertheless was sucked into rooting for him as he got closer and closer to the truth. Furthermore, I damn near wanted to cheer that Morgan, even as he had his characters throw out random bits of slang dialogue in the course of their conversations, never once went out of his way to try to clue in the reader as to what these terms were supposed to mean. He does the reader the courtesy of assuming that she will be smart enough to figure it out. And I love that.
And the whole concept of moving a person's entire consciousness around between bodies was highly intriguing, too. Morgan does an excellent job of laying out how this has changed society, not only socially but in terms of religion as well. As a fan of the new BSG, though, I had to giggle and giggle at the very first chapter where he wakes up in his new body--because anybody who's seen the Season 2 BSG episode "Downloaded" will find the tank in which he wakes up very familiar. ;) "ZOMG HE'S A CYLON" kept going through my head through much of the book.
Highly recommended for a hard SF read. Four stars!
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Date: 2007-06-07 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 02:17 pm (UTC)The About the Author bit at the end of the book says something about the movie rights to this thing having been bought, which made me perk up. This would make a kickass movie, too!
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Date: 2007-06-07 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-08 02:20 pm (UTC)Glad to know the sequels are readable too. I'll be looking for Broken Angels next!