Altered Carbon

Who else saw the previews for “Altered Carbon” as a Netflix show and thought, “crap, that’s on my TBR list – I better get started!”? Anyone else? Just me? Cool.

So I grabbed my handy Nook and pulled up the book that I bought eons ago and just never got around to reading: Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan.

Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)
This is part science-fiction, part fantasy, part noir, and part mystery. There’s a lot going on, it’s a vastly different world, and it takes some getting used to. On the one hand, the book takes place on Earth and you have all the normal, Earthy things you’d expect: cities, police departments, rich people with way too much money and power, gangs in the streets, and the United Nations sitting atop the judicial pyramid.

On the other hand is that this is hundreds of years in the future and technology dominates in a way we just aren’t familiar with. Hotels are run with artificial intelligence. Cars fly. London is an easy 3-hour flight from California because it’s just sub-orbital. And things from the Matrix movies – the virtual realities you get to by plugging yourself in, the ability to learn something by downloading a program into your brain, the artificial intelligence, extra people growing in sacs – are here, too.

The kicker of it is that people these days don’t have to die. Everyone is fitted with a “stack”: a little computer thing that gets attached to the top of their spine. This stack retains “you”: your memories, your experiences, who you are. You get mortally wounded in a war? No problem; they take out your stack and pop it in another body and wake you back up. You kill someone and get sentenced to 300 years in prison? No biggie; they’ll just put your stack in storage, and when your 300-year sentence is over they’ll put you into a new, synthetic body. In this world, “real death” only occurs if (1) your stack is destroyed when your current body dies or (2) you’re Catholic (that religion has decided it goes against God to live forever in synthetic bodies).

So, there’s one small problem: if humans spend 75 years traveling to a new planet, got there and realized there were really angry flowers that ate them during daylight, it would take 75 years for them to get help. Or, if a war breaks out somewhere that takes 100 years to travel to, by the time reinforcements or other military forces could arrive there might be nobody left to help. The solution: a really small group of elite soldiers called Envoys. The Envoys are highly trained in all sorts of warfare and soldier-skills, and are also trained to adapt quickly to new bodies. If those people 75 years away needed help tomorrow, an Envoy has their stack sent via needlecast (a super-speedy way to transmit only data) and put into a body in the area so those people could have help immediately.

Phew – that’s a lot of background. But now you’ll be able to understand what I’m saying.

Our main character is really a guy named Kovacs – an Envoy with a questionable background. On one hand, being an Envoy makes you an incredible bad-ass of legendary proportion. On the other hand, because of all the things you’re trained in, you can’t run for political office, you can’t hold any position of power, you can’t just assimilate back into society when you’re done . . . it’s unfortunate. So lots of Envoys start mercenary careers when they’re done with the Envoys, and Kovacs is no different. He was killed during an arrest (he may or may not have been trying to traffic some contraband), but his stack is retained in storage because he’s got some serious skills. So, virtual jail for him.

Then suddenly he wakes up in a different body. His stack has been transmitted via needlecast to Earth, where a guy named Laurens Bancroft (a really, really, really old guy who’s got enough money to live forever) wants him to find out who murdered him. Laurens’ has his own stack programmed to back itself up every 48 hours, but he has no idea what happened in the hours before his death or who did it. The police declared it a suicide, which Laurens thinks is absolutely not possible. So, Laurens has brought Kovacs to Earth to solve his murder and is promising Kovacs a new body of his choice and a substantial sum of money if he is successful. For Kovacs, he cares not one iota about Laurens but the possibility of living in reality again after a number of years on the stacks is one he can’t pass up.

Of course, it’s not just a simple mystery. There is a large supporting cast, each with a backstory and fully developed personality. There are plenty of people who don’t like Kovacs for the simple reason that Laurens decided to have him sleeved in the body of Elias Ryker, a cop who may or may not have been dirty (Elias Ryker’s stack is currently jailed for those dirty things, so Kovacs is just using his physical body on a lease taken out by Laurens). It also just so happens that Ryker’s girlfriend is the cop who investigated Laurens’ murder in the first place (who says people 300+ years old don’t have a sense of humor?) and who’s paying for the physical body to be maintained while Ryker’s conscious is on stack. She has an obvious, vested interest in seeing that Kovacs doesn’t damage the body he’s wearing.

And so . . . off we go, along for the ride as Kovacs tries to understand this crazy planet and unravel the mystery of what really happened.

I liked this main character. Kovacs is clearly his own person and follows his own internal conscious more so than allowing himself to be led by anyone. He is rough around the edges, but generally seemed to mean well despite the fact he was sometimes a little over zealous. He had no problem dispensing his own interpretation of justice, and sometimes you just have to appreciate the dedication.

There were a few false conclusions. It would seem all the loose ends got tied up and then one of those threads would come completely unraveled and the story kicks back into high gear. That happened a few times. Normally, I think I’d be annoyed by that and would think the author was just milking it. For this story, though, I really enjoyed it. The conclusion managed to somehow tie back to all the characters and all the threads and answered all the questions, without being too unrealistic (you know how some books have such convenient endings that it’s just hard to buy? – this wasn’t one of those). I enjoyed the cleanliness of it.

I liked this book very much. It was a little hard for me to get into it, but I think that’s because so much of it was new. A new world, new technology, all these subcultures and histories and names that I didn’t recognize, and a large number of characters that are somehow all interconnected. Once I got used to the jargon and the people, it was smooth sailing. And there was no extra background just to take up space and fill the pages – it was all solid, useful, purposeful content. Altered Carbon is the first in a series and my presumption is that the next books will be easier to dive into now that I know the background.

If you are squeamish, not a big fan of the sci-fi world, would prefer not to see the main character acting like an asshole periodically . . . maybe this is not for you.

Also, if you have read the book and have high hopes for the Netflix version, maybe take it all with a giant grain of salt. The previews I saw do not match the book I read. There’s a super helpful post I found that details how the two versions are different, if you’d like to not be disappointed.

18 Changes Netflix’s Altered Carbon Made From The Original Books

Personally, I’ll be adding the sequels to my TBR pile and the Netflix version to my “watch-after-the-Olympics” to-do list.

Overall: 8.5/10

Discussion

  1. Val
  2. Sue
  3. Jon
  4. mp4
  5. Nam
  6. Gay
  7. med
  8. med

Leave a Reply