Book Review: Altered Carbon

I heard about Altered Carbon on NPR when they had a librarian talking about good books to read.  This one sounded pretty interesting, so I picked it up off Amazon.  The book is written by Richard Morgan.  Altered Carbon is Morgan’s first novel, and he has another one out with the same main character called Broken Angels. 

The book is set far in the future and the colonization of space is well underway.  The story starts out on a colony world called Harlan’s World, but quickly the setting returns to Earth where the rest of the plot unfolds.  In the future people’s consciousness can be digitally stored in what they call a “stack”, located at the base of the neck.  All a person is, all their memories, thoughts, etc. are transferred to the stack for storage.  When a body dies, the stack is removed and placed into a new body (either synthetic body, or a real, healthy body who has had it’s own stack removed for some reason).  Criminals are sentenced to massive amounts of years of imprisonment, and they spend that time in “storage”, where their stack is removed and put in storage for that amount of time.  Meanwhile, their body (Morgan refers to the bodies as “sleeves”) has someone else’s stack loaded into it.  The process isn’t cheap, so not everyone gets to live forever this way, but it does put a twist into things because it is hard to actually kill anyone, or know that they are dead for sure.  The sting of death is hardly felt anymore.

The story is about an impossibly rich man who is thousands of years old named Bancroft.  Bancroft pulls some strings to get Takeshi Kovacs (the main character) downloaded from Harlan’s World to Earth.  Bancroft had died the previous week and his stack had been destroyed in the process, but thanks to remote backup of his stack he was re-sleeved and was interested in finding out what happened to him.  The police had ruled it a suicide, but Bancroft thought it had to be murder.  Kovacs was an Envoy, which was a special forces group of the military that were trained to be sent from world to world, downloaded into new sleeves and fight.  Kovacs had since turned to crime and was on storage at Harlan’s World when Bancroft had him brought in for a private investigation into his own death.

The story unfolds from there and has some great twists.  Sometimes I had a hard time keeping up with the names of people Kovacs knew from his past since they were only in the story as names (not even really involved in flashbacks).  It was like someone in a present day story saying “Bill Gates”.  People would know who that was, but if the story had been written in the 50s, it would just be a name.  Also, the book contained some scenes that were definitely meant for a mature audience, which wasn’t something I expected out of a book that had been recommended by NPR.  It was a bit sexually explicit in a few places.

Rating: 4 out of 5
Recommendation: The Sci-Fi level was good.  The plot was pretty good and the action was great.  The story was sometime a bit hard to follow when he just rattled place or people’s names off that meant next to nothing and were mentioned only once in the book.  If you like stories along the genre of Blade Runner, then this would be a good story for you.  In fact, Hollywood has optioned this book for a movie.