Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Jul 29, 2013 Meg rated it it was ok

Shelves: 21st-century, genre-sci-fi, subgenre-cyberpunk

this is one of the examples of a book where i have absolutely no clue why it was in first person, since the main character has nothing about him that needs to be communicated through him narrating. and yeah, he just really irritated me, with his macho "i'm such a tough super spy/assassin/fighting machine" routine. even with all of his state of the art enhancements, he was remarkably stupid. otherwise could've been a good book, but 500 pages in the head of this tough guy hamburger brained dude, l ...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Carla Patterson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, 2018-reading-challenge

Every time I recommend this book to someone, I know that it's a toss up whether or not they will love it, let alone like it, even though it's one of my all-time favorites in any genre. Not only do I love the book, I love the unabridged audiobook with Todd McLaren's narration. A huge disappointment for me was when the third book in the Kovacs' trilogy was narrated by someone else - not only not as good as McLaren, but one of the worst narrators I've ever heard butcher good writing. What was Audib Every time I recommend this book to someone, I know that it's a toss up whether or not they will love it, let alone like it, even though it's one of my all-time favorites in any genre. Not only do I love the book, I love the unabridged audiobook with Todd McLaren's narration. A huge disappointment for me was when the third book in the Kovacs' trilogy was narrated by someone else - not only not as good as McLaren, but one of the worst narrators I've ever heard butcher good writing. What was Audible thinking when they made that change? No matter - all of the books are available in many languages and many editions so most people will be able to avoid that particular aural tragedy. ;)

This book had me from the first few pages and it never let go even years after I'd first read it. I have reread it numerous times and have considered trying to write something in that universe but, really, I just wish Morgan would write more there. His use of language is nothing short of the best kind of poetic and the depth of feeling (often within a context where feeling is being suppressed) is like very few other authors I've read have achieved. For me, there is so much resonance that it's almost frightening.

I have spent much of my life identifying with male protagonists more than female ones because, quite frankly, most female protagonists seem more like a different species than the same gender. This has proven to be both sad and annoying to me over the decades given how many books I've read by people spanning all of the gender positions humans can come up with. The exceptions are few and far between but powerful when I come across them - Octavia Butler's female characters come to mind immediately. I also loved Joanna Russ' Alyx and some of Kit Reed's women but, as you can see, they are all science fiction characters. In novels about reality, I have almost never experienced a female protagonist I can identify with and fantasy, though full of heroines, seems to stick to some very standard representations of what it means to be female without ever representing me.

I say all of this because I've noticed that many of the reviews I've read of Altered Carbon in recent years which were written by women have experienced the book so differently from the way that I have. Given the above musings, I shouldn't be so surprised. As much as I love specific women or admire whole groups of women, or how much I feel like a woman, I don't seem to share one of my gender's most prominent aspects and that is extra estrogen. I truly believe that hormonal differences can create chasms between both individuals and groups of people - just look at the so-called war of the sexes and there's no need to look any further.

(God I can be a windbag!)

I respond more to how people write than to genres or stories and have often loved novels which took me somewhere specific and evocative even when the story it told turned me off completely. It is absolutely thrilling for me when I come across an author who takes me somewhere I actually want to go with his/her writing and tells a story which is meaningful to me and might even be transformational. Altered Carbon is so rich with layers and characters, so deep in terms of thought and experience, so rife with life in all of its varieties, that I am constantly immersed from the first sentence to the last. That it is also one of the most interesting and innovative takes on science fiction, with way-too plausible near future concepts and dilemmas, is added value of the best possible kind. That's why I always suggest that people give it a try.

As some reviewers point out, there is a lot of violence in this book. The thing is, for me, it's not more than is living and breathing around me all the time. For those who have never lived in a major city and/or haven't been made aware of the violence of human life for whatever reason, these things might come as a shock. For me, it just makes it seem realistic. That very realism is why the things which aren't real can touch me so deeply. It is not a book wallowing in violence; on the contrary, it's a book about a person who is sick of violence because he was once a soldier and yet is forced to take on that role over and over again by society and those who control it. It's observations of individual psyches and emotions, of human relationships and how complex they are, of societal ills and how to thwart them (or try to) are all very meaningful to me.

One of the many ironies of life for me is that I was raised to be, and have always been, a pacifist. But, when it comes to literature and film, quite often it is soldiers I most identify with. Maybe it's only after fighting for one's life, and having taken the lives of other human beings, that most people come to the conclusions I came to as a child because of being overly empathic - killing destroys not only the people who are killed but also both those who do the killing and those who survive as witnesses. There are lots of ways to become world-weary but, once one is, it's a world of strange bedfellows.

BTW, I think the Netflix series by the same name is BRILLIANT. I didn't dare hope it could be that good but everything about it was just exquisite and, even when they had to compress a story or change it in some way, they did it without changing the meaning or impact of the story. That's amazing and extremely rare. ...more

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May 16, 2012 John Montagne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Awesome. Two genres collide, cyberpunk meets old gumshoe. The result is a novel filled with technical wonders that are somehow easily explained/understood, with action that is fast-paced and with just enough grit to make you think you've got a front row seat. There is also an explicit part that can only be described as 'science fiction sex', yeah, it's that awesome. eh eh eh... ...more

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Aug 19, 2019 Maria rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 stars, will round up to 4

I pretty much committed a cardinal sin with this and watched the show before reading the book. 99 times out of 100, the book is better than the film of movie, but I'm going to have to say that I really prefer the show in this case. The book is decent, and I did like it for the most part, but I felt that Takeshi wasn't that relatable. His personality basically revovled around guns and sex. In fact, most of the characters felt a little flat to me, whereas in the show t ...more

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