Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1) in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Aug 14, 2008 Stephen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: multiple-award-nominee, 2000-2005, award-nominee-philip-k-dick, hardboiled-and-noir, mystery, signed-first-or-limited-edition, kings-of-badassia, award-nominee-locus, favorite-ideas, audiobook

5.0 to 5.5 stars. A fantastic debut novel by a great new voice in Science Fiction. The world-building is superb and the concept of "re-sleaving" and the myriad ways in which society changes when death no longer is permament are exceptionally handled. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

Winner: Philip K. Dick Award for Best Novel (2004)

Nominee: Locus Award for Best First Novel (2003) ...more

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Jul 15, 2008 Chris rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

I really wanted to like this book.

Richard Morgan was on a panel at Eastercon a couple of years ago, and later I picked up Altered Carbon and its sequel, Broken Angels. I ground to a halt on Altered Carbon and only picked it up again last week.

It's essentially an ultraviolent noir thriller set in a science fiction dystopia. The only gamechanging SF element is Digital Human Storage - you can backup your mind to a cortical stack, and if you die you can download to a new body in a process called res I really wanted to like this book.

Richard Morgan was on a panel at Eastercon a couple of years ago, and later I picked up Altered Carbon and its sequel, Broken Angels. I ground to a halt on Altered Carbon and only picked it up again last week.

It's essentially an ultraviolent noir thriller set in a science fiction dystopia. The only gamechanging SF element is Digital Human Storage - you can backup your mind to a cortical stack, and if you die you can download to a new body in a process called resleeving. This is Egan-lite, and it's more a plot hook than a reason to explore the technology, the philosophy or any profound societal changes. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but anyone who's read SF that explores the deeper implications of this technology may come away feeling shortchanged. Evidently there is a rich-poor divide, in that the rich are more or less immortal but the poor struggle to afford their next clone, but otherwise consciousness downloading seems to have left little mark on society. We know the technology's been around for at least three centuries... it seems like things would have grown stranger, after three hundred years.

So the 26th century is strangely familiar. One might suppose there's a cultural stasis imposed by an elite of effectively immortal oligarchs, but the world we see is far more similar to the world we know than the world of 500 years ago. And it is hinted that Earth is inhabited by stay-at-home luddites, so for all we know there are entire polises of uploaded humans spamming the cosmos. The backstory is revealed in intriguing snapshots - nobody infodumps huge tracts of history - and there's probably more of the story revealed in the sequels.

Unfortunately, it's a hard slog, and by the halfway mark my attention was drifting. It's a murder mystery, but by the end I couldn't really give you a good summary of what actually happened, let alone why. It's full of genuinely good writing, but did it engage me? Not really. It's good enough to start the sequel, but only because it's already waiting on the shelf. ...more

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Jun 29, 2013 Patrick rated it liked it

Little bit slow for me.

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Jan 23, 2018 Keith rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

This book was pretty original and was altogether an interesting read. I'm curious to see where the author goes from here, because all of the loose ends were tied up so it could have easily been a stand alone. The book definitely had dark themes, so it might not be for everyone. ...more

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