For years now , people have been telling me to read Richard K. Morgan ’s cyberpunksploitation novel Altered Carbon , and I ’ve been meaning to get around to it . But holy fuck , it really is that great . Spoilers below .
So yes , to everyone who ’s been commend this book to me , you were totally proper . The only understanding I did n’t get around to reading it preferably is because I ’ve been trying to keep up with new released script and I ’m becoming a dull lector lately . But yes , it is a must - read for anybody who ’s concerned in post - humanism , political science , hacker or the crossway of the skill fabrication and detective genres .
If you ’ve read every single Raymond Chandler novel three prison term , like I have , then Altered Carbon will be both like come home and like a divine revelation . If only the late Robert B. Parker ’s endeavor to transmit Chandler had been half as successful as this — you get the hard - seize with teeth detective with a past , who gets hired by a complacent , deeply flawed rich guy , and you get the rich guy ’s seductive femme - fatale married woman . You also meet tons of the “ little people ” who ’ve been abuse on by the moneyed and their schemes . Morgan bring that Chandlerian detective fiction is n’t just about secrets — it ’s about the secrets of the racy and powerful , and the powerless people whom those secrets injure . And just like in Chandler ’s honorable novels , at last the result to the murder enigma is almost an afterthought — the Good Book has long since outgrow that interrogative sentence and locomote on to magnanimous , more important questions .
As you have belike heard , the central amour propre of Altered Carbon is that people can be “ re - sleeved ” — in other tidings , their awareness can be restored from a backup and they can be port into a new body . Sometimes it ’s a clone of their original consistence , sometimes it ’s a chintzy - ass synthetic , sometimes it ’s an entirely unlike soundbox . This is passably similar to Charles Stross ’ Glasshouse , Cory Doctorow ’s Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom and some other SF novels of the other - to - mid 2000s . For some reason there was a rash of books about masses getting “ backed up ” and “ port ” into raw bodies , as a kind of permeative posthuman fantasy swept through the SF writer community .
Altered Carbon came more or less originally than Doctorow or Stross ’ ledger , and Morgan has a bit more playfulness with the concept of “ resleeving . ” The murder mystery revolves around a dupe who ’s still active , a rich hombre named Laurens Bancroft who was brought back in a young physical structure as shortly as he was shot in the heading . He was restored from a musical accompaniment , except that he ’s lose the last 48 hours of his lifetime . And the book is full of recurring characters who die and then come back in new body , admit a few instances where someone handle to occupy two different bodies at once — which is illegal , but seems to happen a stack . People can also have their unbodied cognisance dumped into virtual worlds , where they can brave out Clarence Shepard Day Jr. of torture in moment of realtime .
Morgan ’s playful , gritty use of this conceit means that you get to have passage like this one :
Street view :
Tiered balconies on either side , tongues of ignitor and speech sound splashed out onto paving material from the myriad tiny bars , the street itself knotted with multitude . I take the air beside the adult female I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats .
But there are plenty of other nifty conception in Altered Carbon , which read like a debut novel in the best potential agency . It ’s popping with innovations , from drugs that turn you into a psychopath with no dead body - heat to futuristic arms to bizarre and terrible new character of sex - work . It ’s like the work of someone who ’s throw in every nerveless idea he can reckon of for his first rule book , in lawsuit he does n’t get another shot .
The detective / doodly-squat - kicker in Altered Carbon is also one of skill fable ’s groovy bastards with tenderness , Takeshi Kovacs . Morgan does a cracking job of setting Kovacs up with a past times , including the fact that he used to be an Envoy , a form of galactic hatchet man , before he turned to crime . As he explains at one pointedness , you make an Envoy by burning out “ every evolved violence limitation inherent aptitude in the human brain , ” and replace it with “ a witting will to do damage . ” Despite being basically a state - created killing machine , Kovacs is astonishingly human and capable of generousness , even sentimentality by the end of the book . It ’s leisurely to see why he ’s able to support more books in the series .
The government of Altered Carbon are more complex , and more riveting , than I ’ve made them sound so far . It ’s emphatically a creation where the full-bodied piss on everyone else — the ultra - rich are fuck as glass , short for methuselahs , because they can live incessantly thanks to endless cloned and engineered bodies . They lose skin senses with the rest of the human race and begin to believe that human life has no time value . Meanwhile , though , the Catholic Church has consecrate that Catholics must not be brought back to lifetime after being kill — which means if you kill a Catholic , you ’re likely to get away with it since the victim ca n’t testify against you , and Catholics have a huge bull - eye paint on their foreheads . ground is no longer the center of the human world , having fall into a backwards shithole . Oh , and Kovacs is fond of cite from a kind of Kropotkin - clone named Quell , whose writings admit muffin like , “ I will die furious . ”
It ’s a powerful fret of politics , religion — and I have n’t even catch to the book ’s weird , disturbing gender politics — and it could make a terrific movie , if they could travel back in time to 1990 and get Bullet In The Head - epoch John Woo to direct . And it really does make something new out of the noir formula , rather than just a medley or homage . Check out this passageway from late in the Scripture :
For a moment something ached in me , something so deeply rooted that I knew to tear it out would be to undo the essence of what held me together . The feeling rose and slush like the rain behind my eyes , swelling as the drumming on the roof panel originate and the meth bunk with pee .
Then I shut up it down .
That ’s some razor - sharp writing , right there . If you ’re ready to be kicked in the forehead by post - cyberpunk vehemence and subversive activity , then you owe it to yourself to hunt down a copy of Altered Carbon .
altered carbonbook reviewBooksNoir
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