Altered Carbon

A science fiction written by Richard Kingsley Morgan in 2002
Reviewed edition by Ballantine from 2006
A paperback has 520 pages
ISBN 0-345-45769-2

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In a distant future, two particular technological leaps have changed mankind. First comes personality digitization, the ability to copy the entire human mind and recreate it in another body. Add faster than light communication, and you get a world like no other.

Death is no longer fatal, unless it is a real death, which destroys the stack that holds a copy of the human mind. Bodies are no longer bodies, they become sleeves, used until they wear down and the owner gets another. Interstellar travel becomes a bigger brother of file sharing, with people needlecast and sleeved much like movies are downloaded and played these days.

But not all new things are that much fun. Prisons, for one thing, are no longer in fashion. Locking somebody up is not efficient, it is much better to put the personality in storage and rent the sleeve in the meantime. Which is where we find our hero, Takeshi Kovacs - fresh on prison leave, temporarily sleeved on lease to one Lauren Bancroft.

Bancroft has been riding the winds of change quite well. After several hundred years of swapping sleeves, few can match his wealth and influence. Recently, however, his fortunes have encountered a small glitch: Bancroft has killed himself. With a backup sleeve on standby, this has about as much impact on his life as a hangover after a night in town, but Bancroft keeps wondering what happened. Which is where Kovacs comes in. Former special operations, later small crime, currently on storage for hundred years or so, he is leased by Bancroft on simple terms: solve the suicide and be free, or go rot in storage.

Review

With so many futuristic inventions, Altered Carbon belongs firmly to the science fiction domain. But with the way Takeshi Kovacs takes care of things, the book is also a detective story in the best tradition of Raymond Chandler - fast, hard, good.

The book actually appealed to me in many ways. The writing is very skilled - natural-sounding dialogues that paint the characters in many interesting shades, nail-biting action that makes it impossible to stop reading, all that. The various technologies that decorate the story are not overly insulting to my engineering sense (I have only kept wondering why, if personality transfer is so common, would backup be so hard). And, it is also nice to see that even with Envoy background, Takeshi Kovacs is no superman (actually, the way Envoys are described throughout the book, they probably should be, so it is a relief to see that Takeshi Kovacs does have to struggle a bit to get by :-).

And there is one other thing that I have appreciated. The book does not shy away from touching upon many societal issues - and, to my delight, the individual characters not only appear to have a reasoned opinion on most of them, but they also do not go around spewing it left and right - instead, they just drop a hint here and there that lets you know (those interested can read any of the later books by Terry Goodkind to sample the opposite extreme of this particular spectrum).

All in all, I can only recommend the book.

Rated as good by Ceres on 2009-10-03

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