I have a really mixed reaction to this book. It starts off well, builds itself up, finds itself in a crescendo of confusion, and ends with a nice tying-up of the plot.
Takeshi Kovacs lives in the future when it is possible to store a human being’s personality and memories digitally. Consequently most people have a stack
implanted shortly after birth which records themselves as their lives progress. At death, the personality can be implanted in a new body, real, cloned, or artificial. Death is painful, but not permanent. Real death occurs when the stack is destroyed. And some people are rich enough to have their personality transmitted and recorded remotely, so even if the stack is destroyed they have a backup, although usually a few hours to a few days old.
Kovacs is an Envoy. In other words, a special ops kind of guy. The difference between him and special ops is that he is trained to sense other people’s moods, and so can anticipate what they will do. He’s left the envoy corps and been a semi-criminal for a while. The punishment for his latest crime is to be kept in storage for a couple hundred years. He’s paroled into another person’s body and met by Kristin Ortega, a lieutenant in the local police, who takes an interest in Kovacs’ case.
Laurens Bancroft is a rich Methusaleh, or person who has lived several hundred years. He was killed recently and his stacked destroyed. This would result in real death, except that Bancroft is rich enough to have his personality downloaded every 48 hours. Except that the method of death means either he did it or his wife did it. The police (meaning Kristin Ortega) figure it was suicide, and close the case. Why bother investigating, when Bancroft only loses a couple of days memory? Bancroft isn’t satisfied, and thinks someone else killed him. Figuring they might try again, he has Kovacs paroled into a body on Earth (his homeworld is called Harlan’s World) to investigate and figure out what really happened.
Most of the story is pretty typical hard-boiled detective style novel, except set in this strange future. And for the most part it works. Except towards the end when the number of twists gets too many, and the number of characters gets too many and the number of alliances and swerves and past histories gets too many. So for 50 or 60 pages I had a hard time figuring out what the hell was going on. All is revealed though. Toward the end, Kovacs confronts one of the bad guys, who he gets to confess at gunpoint. And then everything makes sense, even if it’s pretty cliché.
It’s a little cliché for me, and a little too confusing for me. But it was engrossing enough that I’ll pick up another Takeshi Kovacs novel and see if Morgan improves at all. Particularly if it includes the Ortega character, who I really liked. Kovacs himself was kind of cookie-cutter in the mystery novel world.
Title: Altered carbon
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Series: Takeshi Kovacs ; 1
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Ballantine / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 375 p.
Publication date: March 2003
ISBN-10: 0-345-45768-4
LC classification: PS3613.O748 A78 2003
