Altered Carbon - Softcover

Morgan, Richard K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345457692 ISBN 13: 9780345457691

Publisher: Del Rey, 2006

Synopsis

In a twenty-fifth-century world in which death is nearly obsolete, thanks to a technology that allows a person's consciousness to be downloaded into a new body, former U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs, re-sleeved into a new body after a brutal death, finds himself caught in the middle of a deadly far-reaching conspiracy that could have horrifying repercussions. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

Richard Morgan's debut SF thriller Altered Carbon isn't for the faint-hearted. Its noir private-eye investigation races through extreme violence, hideously imaginative torture and many high-tech firefights.

In 2411, death is not forever. Afterward, they can read your personality from an implanted "cortical stack" and upload you into a new body--at a price. Hero Kovacs has worn many bodies on different worlds as a former member of the UN Envoy Corps, programmed killers to a man. Now the incredibly rich Bancroft brings him to Earth to investigate a killing... of Bancroft himself, restored from his digital backup and rejecting the police theory of suicide.

Half the vice-lords of 25th-century San Francisco are soon chasing Kovacs with futuristic surveillance, drugs and weaponry. Virtual-reality interrogation means they can torture you to death, and then start again. There's a bleak slave trade in rented or confiscated bodies--and Kovacs finds his current borrowed face is all too well known to both police and underworld.

Ultraviolent set-pieces follow, sprinkled with philosophical asides such as this reflection on a stungun: "It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped around me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death."

There are some James-Bondian implausibilities, such as Kovacs's final confrontation with the villain he's sworn to kill: rather than shooting and leaving fast, he discusses the plot for 10 pages until... but that would be telling. This is high-tension SF action, hard to put down--though squeamish readers may shut their eyes rather frequently. --David Langford

Review:

'Brilliant. Unputdownable. And lots of similar blurb-writing clichés, only in this case all true. I loved it.' -- Adam Roberts

'Carbon-black noir with drive and wit, a tight plot and a back-story that leaves the reader wanting a sequel...' -- KEN MACLEOD

'Hits the floor running and then starts to accelerate. For a first novel it is an astonishing piece of work.' -- Peter F. Hamilton

About this edition

• Publisher: Del Rey
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0345457692
• ISBN 13: 9780345457691
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 526