Coolhand
Spiff's Stunt Double
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2006
- Messages
- 495
I've raved about this book before, but never in review form, so...
Short version: Ice-cool, razor-smart, eye-gougingly violent sci-fi noir.
Long Version:
HERE BE SPOILERS! ENTER AT THINE OWN RISK!
There’s a great moment in a Discworld book where someone states that only two things are certain, Death and Taxes. Death replies that, whilst this might be true, he only turns up once.
If Pratchett’s Death were to exist in the world of Altered Carbon, he’d be getting a lot of repeat business.
Altered Carbon is a hard boiled detective novel set in 26th century, where death doesn’t have to be fatal. An implant known as a cortical stack is placed in the base of the skull, recording your mind and, should you snuff it, this copy of your mind can be downloaded into a new body. Or into a Matrix-like Virtuality. Or just stored somewhere until it is needed again. However, like all technologies the rich get the best deals and the financial costs mean that for most people, one or two resurrections is all you get.
This is the world of Takeshi Kovacs, a former UN elite secret agent known as an Envoy, trained to jump from body as though he were just changing clothes. Now self employed, he’s no stranger to death (he gets blown away in the first ten pages of the book then resurrected) or violence (Envoys, almost by their nature, are a pretty sociopathic bunch of nutters) so he's the perfect man to hire if you need something dirty doing. In this case, the man who needs dirty doing is a freshly resurrected billionaire who believes his last death was down to foul play. He wants Kovacs to find the killer. So off goes our cynical, burned out hero, into the dark underbelly of 26th century New York…
Altered Carbon is a book that could have gone very wrong very quickly. From the cortical stack concept to the blending of film noir and gritty sci-fi, in the hands of a lesser writer this could have been a train-wreck.
It isn’t.
The atmospheric plot is tight and tense. The prose is visceral poetry. The ideas and world are deep and satisfying. The characters interesting and vivid. And best of all, anti-hero’s have a new god.
Kovacs be thy name.
Simply put, he is Jack Bauer Squared. Bauer Cubed. Bauer to the Power of Infinity.
For example. About a third of the way through the book, Kovacs is captured by the bad guys and horribly tortured. (And I mean horribly) Via a lot of cunning and a little brute force, he manages to escape his captors and set himself free. Now, most protagonists who’ve gone through what he has would limp off, curl up into a ball somewhere and try to recuperate. Maybe dribble and whimper a bit. Possibly have an psychotic episode.
Kovacs however simply stomps back to his hotel, grabs some guns, stomps back to the torture facility from which he’s just escaped and shoots the whole bloody lot of them.
Later on he downloads his mind into two separate bodies. Whilst one of them goes off to engage in sex with a femme fatal and her 50 clones, the other, clad in a custom made tech-ninja body, sneaks into a secret high security base to accomplish a dangerous mission.
Seriously.
That’s how cool he is. In fact he is beyond cool. He redefines cool. He makes the Fonze look like a rather flustered geography teacher trying to keep control of Class 7A whilst making a panicked and awkward attempt to hit on the pretty art teacher with a chat-up line that he got from a Christmas cracker.
Richard Morgan is quite possibly one of the best writers I’ve ever read. This is one of the best books I've ever read.
Oh, and it has a quirky Gothic assassin named Trepp who likes cats. So maybe Death is in this book after all...
Short version: Ice-cool, razor-smart, eye-gougingly violent sci-fi noir.
Long Version:
HERE BE SPOILERS! ENTER AT THINE OWN RISK!
There’s a great moment in a Discworld book where someone states that only two things are certain, Death and Taxes. Death replies that, whilst this might be true, he only turns up once.
If Pratchett’s Death were to exist in the world of Altered Carbon, he’d be getting a lot of repeat business.
Altered Carbon is a hard boiled detective novel set in 26th century, where death doesn’t have to be fatal. An implant known as a cortical stack is placed in the base of the skull, recording your mind and, should you snuff it, this copy of your mind can be downloaded into a new body. Or into a Matrix-like Virtuality. Or just stored somewhere until it is needed again. However, like all technologies the rich get the best deals and the financial costs mean that for most people, one or two resurrections is all you get.
This is the world of Takeshi Kovacs, a former UN elite secret agent known as an Envoy, trained to jump from body as though he were just changing clothes. Now self employed, he’s no stranger to death (he gets blown away in the first ten pages of the book then resurrected) or violence (Envoys, almost by their nature, are a pretty sociopathic bunch of nutters) so he's the perfect man to hire if you need something dirty doing. In this case, the man who needs dirty doing is a freshly resurrected billionaire who believes his last death was down to foul play. He wants Kovacs to find the killer. So off goes our cynical, burned out hero, into the dark underbelly of 26th century New York…
Altered Carbon is a book that could have gone very wrong very quickly. From the cortical stack concept to the blending of film noir and gritty sci-fi, in the hands of a lesser writer this could have been a train-wreck.
It isn’t.
The atmospheric plot is tight and tense. The prose is visceral poetry. The ideas and world are deep and satisfying. The characters interesting and vivid. And best of all, anti-hero’s have a new god.
Kovacs be thy name.
Simply put, he is Jack Bauer Squared. Bauer Cubed. Bauer to the Power of Infinity.
For example. About a third of the way through the book, Kovacs is captured by the bad guys and horribly tortured. (And I mean horribly) Via a lot of cunning and a little brute force, he manages to escape his captors and set himself free. Now, most protagonists who’ve gone through what he has would limp off, curl up into a ball somewhere and try to recuperate. Maybe dribble and whimper a bit. Possibly have an psychotic episode.
Kovacs however simply stomps back to his hotel, grabs some guns, stomps back to the torture facility from which he’s just escaped and shoots the whole bloody lot of them.
Later on he downloads his mind into two separate bodies. Whilst one of them goes off to engage in sex with a femme fatal and her 50 clones, the other, clad in a custom made tech-ninja body, sneaks into a secret high security base to accomplish a dangerous mission.
Seriously.
That’s how cool he is. In fact he is beyond cool. He redefines cool. He makes the Fonze look like a rather flustered geography teacher trying to keep control of Class 7A whilst making a panicked and awkward attempt to hit on the pretty art teacher with a chat-up line that he got from a Christmas cracker.
Richard Morgan is quite possibly one of the best writers I’ve ever read. This is one of the best books I've ever read.
Oh, and it has a quirky Gothic assassin named Trepp who likes cats. So maybe Death is in this book after all...
