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Altered Carbon (Kovacs) | 
| Author: Richard K. Morgan
Creator: Todd Parker Mclaren
Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
Category: Book
Buy New: £13.49
New (5) Used (3) from £11.66
Avg. Customer Rating:  73 reviews
Sales Rank: 392847
Format: Audiobook, Mp3 Audio, Unabridged
Media: MP3 CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 1400151376
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781400151370
ASIN: 1400151376
Publication Date: January 10, 2005
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 10 to 13 days
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Amazon.co.uk 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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 68 more reviews...
Altered genre January 4, 2009
Very good indeed, and the "brought back to life on the spin of a disc" construct (as long as the deceased's "stack" is intact - OR - they have "remote storage") is in itself thought provoking, but also lends itself to the novel idea that people can claim there were murdered! More bleakly, this is a world where you can be tortured to death, then brought back to life and tortured some more...
I have just bought the sequel and am looking forward to reading it.
Impressive sci-fi thriller December 5, 2008
Takeshi Kovacs is ex-Envoy, trained with conditioning that will transfer with regardless of what Sleeve he's in. After being made an offer of work that he can't refuse he's re-sleeved in body that will turn heads while he carries out his investigation: did Laurence Bancroft commit suicide or was he, as he believes, murdered?
Originally from off-world he is now on Earth, an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar rules and a job that isn't made any easier by those facts. When he starts digging where the police turned a blind eye he finds things that less than reputable people want left alone. With past acquaintances becoming involved and complications arising because of his sleeve, Kovacs finds trouble at every turn until the truth finally comes to light.
I've heard so much about Richard Morgan in the past few years but I've never found myself drawn to any of his work. I picked this one up a couple of months ago and kept on wondering whether or not I should try it. I was quite pleased that in won the poll, I doubt I would have got around to it anytime soon otherwise. So after finally reading it was it as good as I had heard? Well, I can certainly see why Morgan's work is looked upon highly and I'm glad I've now been exposed to it, but it wasn't the amazing read I was expecting.
Altered Carbon is told entirely in the first person, and this can make or break a book in my opinion. If the author hits the right note then it's a joy to read and can give the events a much more personal feeling. This is what we've got here, the perfect balance between story, history and world-building. Following the events through Kovacs' eyes allows the story to unfold and revelations to come at the right time, never once out of place. I liked Kovacs as a character too, which obviously helps enormously!
The other characters are all well suited and the relationships and motivations of each are well fleshed out. The history that we glimpse during the novel shows us just how multi-layered these characters are, how much development has gone into their history and the connections between them. For a book with a first person perspective I was impressed with the effortless way all of this was conveyed. I was given plenty of time with these characters and, although being Kovacs gives a limited view, Morgan was able to get each of the characters across in an unbiased way.
There also wasn't as much action in here as I was expecting, although when it kicked in I was very pleased with the flow of the narrative, the descriptiveness and the detail - enough, but not over the top. The same can be said about much of the story, the richness of the world Kovacs finds himself in is always felt underneath the story and situation. The world-building is also very impressive, but Morgan never reveals that much detail about events and history of this future world. I was a little disappointed with this - I love the in-depth construction of a future society - but with sequels already out there for me to pick up I'm hoping more will be revealed through reading them. If not, doesn't matter, it's a personal preference that in no way effects the story or the outcome of Altered Carbon.
One of the main technologies in Altered Carbon, sleeving, is a great plot device. Essentially it enables the transference of consciousness from one body to another and can mean immortality for those rich enough to keep their minds backed up regularly and clone bodies available should the worst case scenario happen. As this is what the plot revolves around it is refreshing to see a good look at this process and the effects it has on all the characters.
At the end of the day I went into this book with expectations based on what I'd heard about Richard Morgan and his writing and didn't quite find what I thought it would be. Is this a bad thing? Not at all, and putting my expectations aside Altered Carbon is a great novel, one that I'm glad I picked up.
 Brilliant ideas and bad end September 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was really enjoying this book until the last third, when it descended into a boys action fantasy, james bond style!!! kovacs was a really good character unitil he became invincible! you let yourself down mr morgan
This is a fine book but I've go one problem with it August 13, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a good read but there's something I don't like about it; the extremely graphic sex scenes. This seems to be a recurring theme with Morgan and I just don't see how it ads to the story of any of the Takeshi Kovacs novels. It makes me feel like I'm watching a porno or something and that's not how I wan't to feel when I read sci-fi.
 Shockingly poor on so very many levels ... July 23, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
A thin film of noirish standards stapled somewhat haphazardly over a deadening lump of science-fiction clichés.
The plot: Heavily and relentlessly signposted every step of the way; I found myself desperately wishing for misdirection, hoping it would turn out to be something a little more complicated and a lot less parochial than what it eventually, inevitably, turned out to be ... no luck there.
The characters: There aren't any. At worst, a few rough thumbnail sketches and some stage direction, and at best, stock actors playing traditional roles, on rails. The tough but fair but sexy lady cop. The mean and decadent rich man and his mean and decadent wife. The sleazy lawyer. The blast from the past. The one who changes sides right when you expect it. That sort of thing. The lead is no better, having no personality to speak of beyond a series of ticks and a few lines of half remembered poetry. Plus, he's often required to act like a complete and utter dolt for the purposes of moving the plot along, whilst at other points he is merely a receptacle into which passing helpful-stranger ciphers can either info-dump whatever he needs to know next, or just help him out with the heavy lifting.
'Envoy' training: This is a remarkably pointless feature of the novel, and consists of a highly specialised and tuned form of mental training and combat philosophy that enables lead character Kovacs to function in any environment, in any body to which his 'self' has been decanted. What this means in real terms is that Kovacs is exactly like every other protagonist who's ever appeared in an action/combat orientated book or film. He can take care of himself; he's good with a blade or a gun; he won't back down and he does what's necessary, whatever it takes. Yeah, this is called being the 'hero' of the narrative (this type of narrative, certainly). He's special forces, he's an emotionally stunted survivor type, he has a dark past. If this book had been out ten or fifteen years ago he'd most likely have been played by Steven Seagal in the B-movie.
Technology: Some of it seems wildly out of place. Hundreds of years in the future and we still have a clear dependence on projectile weapons and blades, not to mention security which for the most part relies on gathering around yourself a bunch of mooks with projectile weapons and blades ... whereas, in reality, at the first sign of trouble you'd be turning off the air in the corridors and filling the building with quick-set riot foam, or frying their brains with one of those invasive advertising gadgets. There are what appear to be ducted fan flying transports, but also gravity belts, which seems slightly ... wrong. All in all, none of the technological developments seem to have had the slightest impact on humanity or society, as everyone pretty much acts like it's the early 2000s.
Combat: I'm not sure exactly what it is about Morgan's style, but I find his fight scenes extremely pedestrian. Despite the talk of entrails and this 'and then her head exploded' business, they completely lack any sense of movement or energy or visceral impact. Much of this is due to the hero's dogged reliance on pistols, which for the most part tend to turn combat scenes into long paragraphs of 'and then I shot him the head ... and then I shot the other guy in the head'. Morgan's close up work, when he does it, isn't great, but at least it's not terrible. Of course it's fair to say that this disjointed, let's call it storyboarded, style of combat, as with much of the novel, will play better on the big screen with the thumping soundtrack and the rain-swept neon and the exploding heads.
What else: There was some irrelevant torture, indeed, there was a fairly unnecessary first hundred or so pages of wandering and scene-setting (rain, neon, sleaze). There was some light sneering at the Catholic Church, and I was really hoping that their particular sensibility would form a core of the plot, contrasting the actions and attitudes of a long-lived monolithic organisation against those of an individual, good and evil requiring the same outcomes for entirely different purposes, both sides willing to stop at nothing ... but no.
The warrior-zen thing was handled with more heart in Walter Jon Williams' "Voice of The Whirlwind", the role and place of functional immortals was better explored in Joe Haldeman's "The Long Habit of Living", and the rest of Altered Carbon merely reads like Bladerunner Lite, the movie pitch.
It's not all bad. "Sleeving" is an excellent word to describe an old-as-the-hills-of-mars science fiction concept. Plus, I liked the hotel. In fact, I'd like to see a connected set of short stories all about the hotel.
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