Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel (Takeshi Kovacs Novels) [Mass Market Paperback]

Richard K. Morgan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 28, 2006 | Series: Takeshi Kovacs Novels

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This fast-paced, densely textured, impressive first novel is an intriguing hybrid of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Norman Spinrad's Deus X. In the 25th century, it's difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is "digitized" and from which-unless the stack is hopelessly damaged-their consciousness can be downloaded ("resleeved") with its memory intact, into a new body. While the Vatican is trying to make resleeving (at least of Catholics) illegal, centuries-old aristocrat Laurens Bancroft brings Takeshi Kovacs (an Envoy, a specially trained soldier used to being resleeved and trained to soak up clues from new environments) to Earth, where Kovacs is resleeved into a cop's body to investigate Bancroft's first mysterious, stack-damaging death. To solve the case, Kovacs must destroy his former Envoy enemies; outwit Bancroft's seductive, wily wife; dabble in United Nations politics; trust an AI that projects itself in the form of Jimi Hendrix; and deal with his growing physical and emotional attachment to Kristin Ortega, the police lieutenant who used to love the body he's been given. Kovacs rockets from the seediest hellholes on Earth, through virtual reality torture, into several gory firefights, and on to some exotic sexual escapades. Morgan's 25th-century Earth is convincing, while the questions he poses about how much Self is tied to body chemistry and how the rich believe themselves above the law are especially timely.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Booklist

In a society in which death has been rendered practically obsolete, suicide and murder take on different significances. After a particularly brutal offing, former UN envoy Takeshi Kovacs finds himself "resleeved"--that is, his consciousness has been put in a new body--and hired as a private investigator by Laurens Bancroft, one of twenty-fifth-century society's old rich in Bay City (formerly San Francisco). Bancroft claims he was murdered, but the police say it was a suicide. After Kovacs gets hit at his hotel within hours of being resleeved, he sees the possibility that Bancroft was, in fact, murdered, and that someone wants to keep it very hush-hush. As he investigates, he uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy with ties to the most unsavory characters in his generally unsavory military and criminal past. This far-future hard-boiled detective story is a lovely virtual-reality romp distinguished by a conspiracy whose strands have the potential to generate several successful sequels, which is just what its publicity promises. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 526 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; Reprint edition (February 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345457692
• ISBN-13: 978-0345457691
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (300 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Morgan was, until his writing career took off, a tutor at Strathclyde University in the English Language Teaching division. He has travelled widely and lived in Spain and Istanbul. He is a fluent Spanish speaker.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 144 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Cyber Pulp Debut March 16, 2004

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Ever since I saw Blade Runner as a kid, I've been in love with the idea of blending science-fiction with crime, and this is a totally compelling mix of the two. Set about 500 years in the future, the story follows Takeshi Kovacs, a former space marine who has been "resleeved" to investigate a suicide on Earth. You see, in the future, one's mind or consciousness can be digitized and stored in "stacks" implanted in the base of your skull. If you commit a crime, your stack is removed and placed in storage for the duration of your sentence (usually decades or centuries), and then you are "resleeved" in a new body. Of course, resleeving costs, and for many people, a new body is like a new car or new house, with monthly payments to keep up lest your body get repossessed...

The flip side of this is that dying is only a temporary thing-unless your stack has been somehow destroyed and there's no backup, then you're subject to "RD" (real death). And if you've got enough money to get into cloning and data storage, one can live a virtually endless and seamless life. It's one of these "Meths" (after Methuselah, just one example of the excellent creation of slang in the book), who has Takeshi remanded and "needlecast" (digitally freighted) from offworld to investigate his alleged suicide in Bay City (aka San Francisco). Takeshi had been in prison, having been captured as a mercenary in a vibrantly kinetic prologue.

The meth, Bancroft, is one of the future elite, weaving elaborate corporate and political webs with others of his kind. Apparently he committed suicide a few weeks ago, but he's convinced it was murder.... He's paid heftily to have Kovacs released and resleeved to investigate his death and what happened in the 48 hours leading up to it-48 hours that elapsed between his last stack backup and his temporary death. This is a great setup, as we have a reluctant protagonist grudgingly working on a case for a sinister Bancroft, quickly getting caught up with Bay City PD, Bancroft's hyper-sexy wife, and all kinds of foes.

It's an extremely convoluted tale, with lots of double-crossing, plot twists, hidden agendas, sexual tension (and outright graphic sex), dry tough guy humor, and excellent action sequences. It's so jam-packed it almost gets overwhelming at times, and one wishes Morgan had been able to trim just a little bit here and there. However, he's built a very intriguing and nasty future earth, where-as one might well imagine-a lot of the technology gets channeled into the sex trade. This is great pulp fiction, with great characters, including my favorite: the AI Hendrix Hotel. It's a hotel that runs itself using artificial intelligence, making for a hilarious, yet plausible, character. This is a great genre-blending debut, let's hope the sequel (Broken Angels) is as good. Read more ›

67 of 74 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliantly realized August 30, 2003

By John S. Ryan

Format:Paperback

This is one of the best new SF novels I've read in the last ten years.

It's enough of a treat that Richard Morgan can _write_. The author bio indicates that he taught English as a second language for some fourteen years; he can teach a thing or two to us native speakers as well. His narrative and his dialogue are clean, crisp, and focused, with that sense of heightened reality you get from really good fiction; there's not a word out of place, and there's none of the mannered artificiality of e.g. Frank Herbert's _Dune_.

But it's even better than good writing. Morgan has applied his craft to a brand of fiction that one of the cover blurbs describes as a cross between hard-core cyberpunk and hard-boiled detective fiction. That's an odd description of the genre and makes it sound newer than it is, but it's true that there hasn't been a lot of SF detective fiction. And Morgan's contribution advances the ball considerably.

If you're at all familiar with the genre, you're already thinking of Larry Niven's ARM stories (and maybe, though less aptly, of Asimov's _The Caves of Steel_ and _The Naked Sun_). Well, Morgan's world does owe something to Niven's, but he's got very much his own spin. His main character (Takeshi Kovacs), though arguably more Mike Hammer than Hiro Protagonist despite the snowcrashy backdrop, will remind longtime fen of the wisecracking tough-guy heroes that have populated SF since at least the days of Keith Laumer (not to mention Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat). But he's not just a carbon copy (even an altered one)....

And Morgan has found a very interesting way around a problem that has plagued detective fiction since its inception: when your narrative is written in the first person, how do you keep the reader from figuring out that the narrator doesn't get killed? Oh, you can do a Jim Thompson and have the character narrate his own death, but otherwise there aren't too many possibilities.

Morgan has discovered one. As you'll learn within the first few pages, Kovacs has _already_ died at least once, and there's nothing to keep him from dying again, perhaps repeatedly; for reasons that will be clear early on, his death wouldn't keep him from narrating the novel.

The plot is ingenious: it seems that one Laurens Bancroft has committed suicide, but Bancroft himself believes he was murdered and hires Our Hero to investigate. (Yes, you read that correctly; the alleged murder victim wants to know how he was killed.) Beyond that, I'm not going to tell you anything that might spoil your fun.

I _will_ tell you to keep your eyes peeled for a huge number of incredibly cool background details. Like Heinlein, Morgan drops you into the middle of the tale and introduces you to its world in the natural course of the narrative, rather than calling attention to it tourist-fashion. In the process he mentions lots of nifty things that could have been entire novels in their own right (and John W. Campbell would have loved every one of them) -- e.g. computer-automated hotels that upgraded to sentience and bought themselves out from under corporate ownership. Morgan's throwaway ideas are better than most SF writers' main plot points.

I'll also tell you that, as one or two other reviewers have pointed out, there's some fairly graphic sex in this novel -- not to mention some vivid and disturbing violence. It's extraordinarily well-written and I thought it was all quite tastefully handled. But if you haven't got the stomach for such stuff, be warned.

_Very_ highly recommended. If you've spent the last decade or two wondering where all the really good SF has gone, check this one out. It's already on my best-of-recent-SF shortlist, alongside some Alastair Reynolds, China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, and a very small handful of others. Read more ›

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Neo-Sci-Fi Noir May 27, 2003

By John Willis

Format:Paperback

Altered Carbon was an amazing first novel for Richard Morgan. This guy has a future! The book is dark and slick. It defintely has a Blade Runner feel to it along with some Matrix and Maltese Falcon (or even China Town)like mystery thrown in for good measure. The hero (Kovaks)can handle himself in a fight (he is enhanced) but is quite witty at the same time. His one liners cracked me up. The technology of sleeving (down loading one's mind through science into another body) is also fascinating and scary. Overall this is a great summer beach book. If you are looking for a good detective novel set in a futuristic Gibson/Blade Runner like society with lots of action and phylosophy concerning the nature of the human soul get Altered Carbon!

69 of 83 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Bad novel, bad noire, bad SF March 27, 2004

By Tom Rogers

Format:Paperback

Obviously my very strong negative reaction to this novel is in the minority, so before anyone takes my opinion too seriously he/she should take a look at some of the other reviews. Since I am writing in dissent here, I apologise for my less than pithy comments. To see where I'm coming from, you might want to read 'Voice of the Whirlwind' (Williams) which is very similar to 'Altered Carbon' and which succeeds where 'Altered Carbon'falls short. I can review the high points quickly, the thumbnail sketch of the noirish detective story is very good (the overall plot strategy you might say) and the writing on a scene by scene or at the line level frequently sizzles, however at the operational level of plotting and character 'Altered Carbon' mostly failed to work for me. It doesn't work as good science fiction either, and that's a good place to start.

The first person narrator (Kovacs, the 'detective') is supposedly an informed citizen of his future, yet he often lapses into modes of thought which are more appropriate to much more primitive times. This lapse into anachronistic thought patterns happens either for the sake of expedience or to create bogus 'surprises' for both the reader and the narrator. There's a good example of the expedient variety where the protagonist goes off onto a pointless killing spree, knowing that he's under close surveillance by the police and one or two other parties without worrying about any sort of precautionary or evasive action. Maybe Kovacs is just being stupid because the guy doesn't even look over his shoulder, but it also shows that he isn't worrying about futuristic bugs, vastly improved video surveillance syetems etc. So I guess this exemplifies two shoddy practices, expedient anachronism and stupidity.... Obviously, the author's aware of this fault as there's an attempt to paper over this problem, when it's later revealed that the police lost track of Kovacs, but of course he had no way of knowing that at the time he set off on his rampage. If devices of this sort are employed sparingly, I'm pretty forgiving, but if I see that the writer uses them knowingly and often, I think he's disrepecitng my intelligence and indulgence.

The problems with character and plot in 'Altered Carbon' are so closely entwined it's hard to treat them separately. However, the first big problem is that Kovacs is inconsistent, and ironically, another character in the novel obligingly points that out to us, though the inconsistency encompasses more than merely his personality. He's supposed to be some sort of renegade super-effectvie super-psychopath as the result of special training and conditioning. However, he seems more like an impotent, gratuitously violent, unpredictabley sentimental thug, maybe someone like Bobby Brown (Whitney's beau). Everybody in the story, including the viewpoint character, tells us the opposite though. In the context of all the violence and adulation, the reader expects Kovacs to be a smart tough guy, but looking at what he does, how he does it, and why he does it, there doesn't seem to much support for that belief. In order to talk about why the protagonist appears to be wonderfully ineffective and how most of the other characters fail to work for me, I'll need to look at the plot.

The plot moves largely by employing a hackneyed device from detective stories. Almost every bit of knowledge or effective action that comes Kovacs' way is either provided by, done by, or massively enabled by the various women that our hero encounters. Virtually everything he does on his own is either wrong or futile or stupid. Basically, the women he meets fall over themselves to help him out (to be fair at least one wants to kill him) it's like watching a TV episode of 'Mike Hammer' which equally relied on this cliche, but with tongue firmly in cheek, 'Altered Carbon', alas, has no sense of humor about it's absurdities or awkward bits. This dependence on others renders Kovacs very passive and ineffective as a character and makes it hard to beleive what we're told about him or that he qualifies as an amazing and scary guy. Anyway, in order to believe that all these women (and at least one computer) are willing to go to great lengths, take substantial risks, and go against their own best interests to help Kovacs out, I require either sufficient motivation or plotting that manages to keep me from worrying about what is motivating the characters. In this case, I worried a lot about motivation and generally found it wanting, though there's one striking and very cool counterexample.

I think I'll now close with another coupled defect, an example of noire failure and the eager embrace of a dangerous and very popular plot convention which has been ruining many Science Fiction novels for years. A classic noire story is a gestalt allegoy. It starts with the protagonist working on the basis of bad data, mistaken theories and flawed methods, he/she follows these and tests them against a radically different reality, which leads to an enlightenment and some sort of action and conclusion in harmony with the true state of affairs. The point of maximum cognitive dissonance generally occurs very close to the climax. In 'Altered Carbon' this point occurs about 1/3 of the way through the story, and at that point the first part of the novel has an abortive termination and then the novel gets started almost from scratch all over again. For me, the tempo never felt right thereafter. I've seen this structure work, but most of the authors I consider superior noire stylists don't even try. The practice of throwing away a big chunk of a novel and starting all over again is bafflingly common in Science Fiction, and the conventional noire plot easliy lends itself to it, but it's rarely pulled off in either genre or combinations thereof. Read more ›