Altered Carbon
by Richard K. Morgan © 2003
Format: Audiobook (Audible) narrated by Todd McLaron
Publisher: Tantor Media, in arrangement with Random House
Genre: Science fiction/Mystery
"And only the other day a lady told me that girl to whom she had mentioned death replied, ‘Oh, but by the time I’m that age Science will have done something about it."
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
The book's prologue opens with two mercenaries (or maybe assassins): the protagonist Takeshi Kovacs (pronounced, "Koh-vatch") and his lover, Sarah, on the planet Harlan's World, a human colony. While they are preparing for a kill, they are surrounded by the police and are killed after resisting arrest. Altered Carbon takes place in the 25th Century, in which science has, indeed, done something about death. Soon after birth, everyone is surgically implanted with a "cortical stack," into which their minds are downloaded. When the body dies, all one has to do is to retrieve the stack and "re-sleeve" it--that is, put it in a new body, and, voilà, death is cheated. Apparently, Kovacs is tried in absentia and sentenced to time in storage (his stack left unactivated--much cheaper than jail). When Kovacs wakes up, he finds himself in a new sleeve early-- he has been paroled and re-sleeved on Earth. The catch, he learns, is that his sleeve is his only on a six week lease, in which he will investigate the death of a Mr. Laurens Bancroft. Bancroft, far from being dead, is a Meth (short for "Methuselah"), someone centuries old, and has remote back-up (which happens once every two days) for his stack. The task is for Kovacs to investigate his death.
The book chronicles this investigation, and the action hardly lets up even to the very end. Kovacs is hardly a common killer: he is an ex-Envoy, an elite agent for the U.N. trained to quickly acclimate to new sleeves and planets and be a combination spy/assassin/soldier. Kovacs is an anti-hero through and through: a mercenary whose vices include adultery (with two different women), burning out stacks of some, and dishonesty to almost every other character nearly all the time, even his allies. He gets himself out of some impossible situations (including a virtual hell and some vastly unfair fights) without Morgan resorting to deus ex machinas, favoring Kovacs's old fashioned bluffing and trickery to technobabble.
Morgan's gritty world of the future is well thought out and internally consistent. The cornerstone technology (the cortical stack) is especially good, because Morgan plays with many implications of the technology that naturally follow from it but are not immediately obvious. The book is aware of, and plays with, the imagery of heaven and hell. Kovacs is offered both the incredible pleasures available through the technology and on the other hand, put through an ordeal so bad that it is hard to imagine hell being any worse. Locations span from the low Licktown to the sky-high Head in the Clouds, but nowhere is anything more than dark and gritty. Indeed, Kovacs's final act in the novel proper (not including the epilogue) was a act of pure kindness which he does "because I want there to be something clean at the end of all this." Corruption in Kovacs's world, but perhaps not in his own view, is everywhere: from the rich to the poor, from depths to heights, from weak to powerful.
Characterization is probably the weakest point. While the protagonist and several others (such as Ortega) are fully fleshed out and are interesting characters, no characters seem to change. This is not really a problem, since in the genre
Unfortunately, this book has several major offenses against good taste, mitigated somewhat by the fact it was written by a British author and certain profanities he uses are not as severe in his dialect as they are in American English. F-bombs and even uses of the c-word are frequent. There are two very explicit sex scenes (in chapters 10 and 27) which contribute little to the story and even less that couldn't be communicated otherwise or in a non-graphic summary. I bought the book to read a sci-fi, dystopian mystery, not erotica. Still, such little pertinent information is within those scenes that the scenes can be skipped without losing much in terms of the story.
Overall, I liked the book and recommend it with a little hesitation due to the profanity and the merely gratuitous sex scenes. The pacing is spot on, the world Kovacs inhabits rich and vibrant, and look forward to the sequel.
You take what is offered, and sometimes that must be enough.
-Morgan, Altered Carbon
