[.ca] Altered Carbon (ISBN 1400151376)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Richard Morgan's debut SF thriller Altered Carbon isn't for the faint-hearted. Its noir private-eye investigation races through extreme violence, hideously imaginative torture and many high-tech firefights. In 2411, death is not forever. Afterward, they can read your personality from an implanted "cortical stack" and upload you into a new body--at a price. Hero Kovacs has worn many bodies on different worlds as a former member of the UN Envoy Corps, programmed killers to a man. Now the incredibly rich Bancroft brings him to Earth to investigate a killing... of Bancroft himself, restored from his digital backup and rejecting the police theory of suicide. Half the vice-lords of 25th-century San Francisco are soon chasing Kovacs with futuristic surveillance, drugs and weaponry. Virtual-reality interrogation means they can torture you to death, and then start again. There's a bleak slave trade in rented or confiscated bodies--and Kovacs finds his current borrowed face is all too well known to both police and underworld. Ultraviolent set-pieces follow, sprinkled with philosophical asides such as this reflection on a stungun: "It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped around me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death." There are some James-Bondian implausibilities, such as Kovacs's final confrontation with the villain he's sworn to kill: rather than shooting and leaving fast, he discusses the plot for 10 pages until... but that would be telling. This is high-tension SF action, hard to put down--though squeamish readers may shut their eyes rather frequently. --David Langford

E X C E L E N T !!!:
Ever since reading William Gibson's SPRAWL TRILOGY (NEUROMACER, COUNT ZERO & MONALISA OVERDRIVE) had I to come across such powerful yet poetic prose. The myriad of voices echoing from a future dystopia... Just EXCELLENT! Recommended to everyone - especially William Gibson's fans (trying to make do with his latest, well, dyspeptic novels...) Comment

Intruiging and fresh approach to Sci-Fi:
I inherited this book from a friend of mine who moved to England, and I must say, I wish I'd read it earlier. At first, the levels of violence were a bit of a turn-off (I'm not keen on massive gun-laden stories), but the society inside this Sci-Fi novel is just so interesting and well-crafted, I forgave the violence to enjoy it. In this future world, everyone is implanted at birth with a "stack," a chip in the back of neck that keeps your memory and personality on file. If you're murdered, and the stack survives, you're "re-sleeved" into another body (synthetic or not) to testify at your trial. Die of old age? Buy a new sleeve, if you can afford it. The amount of "fallout" in this society due to this technology was astounding, and plausible, and done extremely well by Morgan. At it's heart, this story is a murder mystery, and a story of revenge: someone kills a centuries old "Meth," (Methuselah), who, dutifully backed up every eight hours, comes back, but with no real idea of what happened in those eight hours to lead to his murder, and quite curious about it, and that Meth hires our hero to figure things out. Our hero of the tale is actually a criminal serving time in a virtual jail (his body is, of course, given to someone who needs it more), and he is beamed to earth from his own colony when the Meth hires him. Wearing someone else's body (which has a fallout of its own), the narrator of the tale tries to figure out who would try to kill a man who'd lived centuries, and why... Between religious and spiritual reasons, hatreds, rivalries, and plain-old-jealousies, there are no shortages of potential murderers, and the tale spins wonderfully. I highly suggest it. 'Nathan

Excellence:
I read through this novel faster than any I've ever owned. What makes it easy is the overabundance of action and humour. The reason I finally decided to buy this book was that I'd quoted the sleeving and needlecasting process and wanted a clearer idea of what Morgan actually meant by those terms, in Sci-Fi they are not uncommon but his working implementation of the principles of colony Sci-Fi, though familiar are highly pecimistic. As a source of inspiration it was disappointing, but for entertainment value it is unparalleled. I'm recommend Chris Moriarty to anyone who reads Altered Carbon because the styles are near mirror images of each other. As well as the Kevin Anderson Saga of the Seven Stars simply because there are so many of those books that any fan of the genre should find something satisfying within.

My 100-word book review:
Richard Morgan's debut novel is a fast-moving, stylish, violent detective thriller set in the distant future. I greatly enjoyed the dry, noir-ish humour and the stack/sleeve technology, which is a pretty slick new package for an existing concept (digitised personalities.) The violence may put off some readers, also the general unpleasantness of Morgan's future society; that world is certainly a cold, hard, ruthless place, ruled by soulless corporations and a monolithic and power-hungry United Nations. However, if you are looking for an action-filled yet thoughtful and well-conceived science fiction novel, look no further. Morgan's newer books are very good too!

Too much of a re-sleeve.:
For 'the-well-read-man' there is nothing new in this book, most of it being derived from Iain M Banks': Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background, and Look to Windward; a smattering of William Gibson's: Neuromancer; and some of K. W. Jeter's work - probably Noir. A great deal of the book is concerned with scenes of gratuitous violence, containing just enough material to maintain a thread to the overall narrative. The plot is a basic Raymond Chandleresque romp, which serves to imbue the characters with some motivation... Richard Morgan's prose is unusually good for a British author, comparable to the better US writers such as K. W. Jeter, and devoid of the flowery and redundant elements that mars many of his contemporaries. It's unfortunate that the logical elements of this book aren't as well considered. The most obvious failing was Reileen Kawahara not figuring on the virus she supplied to Takeshi Kovacs being turned on herself, as it subsequently, and conveniently was. There was too little background to the history of the cortical-stack, robbing the story of useful technical details, which would have been more insightful than the Catholic church coming in for some stick - yet again. Another failing was any substantial insight as to why being un-sleeved for a length of judicial-time was of consequence, since the impression was given that unless you were being tortured / interrogated in virtual, you were more or less unconscious for the period. The only significant aspect to any punishment being that you would probably end up in someone else's body or a synthetic of dubious quality. Alternate Carbon is a reasonable book. But is too derivative for 2003. More effort could have been made to make it a more plausibly coherent and interesting read, at least, and with more interesting and convincing nomenclature and associated technology for the twenty-sixth century.