“Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels?”
- Title: Altered Carbon
- Author: Richard K. Morgan
- Genre: Science Fiction – Cyberpunk/Thriller
- Year: 2002
Calling something cyberpunk-noir is almost a tautology, after all it is the hard and clipped cadences of the Hammett-Chandler school that informs much of the prose of cyberpunk writers, most of which also give us a dark and Blade Runner-esque near future. In Altered Carbon Richard Morgan pushes the cyberpunk-noir convergence even further, crafting a detective thriller that doesn’t just play with the themes and tropes of a cyber-future as window dressing, but makes them integral to plot and character. It is a fantastically realized debut novel, stylish and inventive in equal amounts, a crime-thriller mystery in the age of personality downloads and body-swapping.
We are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, minutes before his death. He’s a high-tech criminal and operator on Harlan’s World, and in only a few pages he’s brutally gunned down in a raid in a scene that will surely grab the reader’s attention. The next thing we know he’s on Earth, light years away, in a new and unfamiliar body. Such bodies are called sleeves, and Kovacs having been downloaded into one rather than kept in storage for trial and punishment can only mean someone very powerful is pulling strings on his behalf.
That someone is Laurens Bancroft, a three-hundred plus year old businessman (such near-immortals are termed ‘meths,’ after Methuselah), one of the class of super-rich who can afford to live effectively forever. Bancroft wants Kovacs to investigate his own apparent suicide. Here is the first taste of just how different the rules of the mystery will be in Morgan’s world, for Bancroft seems to have suicidally vaporized his head and his stack — a ubiquitous skull implant made from ‘altered carbon’ that stores personality, and allows it to be retrieved and transferred — in a locked-room mystery suicide. But Bancroft’s stack has a remote back-up, a system that downloads his personality every forty-eight hours as a safe guard, and Bancroft remembers nothing of what transpired within two days of the event. The police closed the case, but Bancroft is still suspicious, not believing he’d kill himself — especially as he knew it wouldn’t ‘take.’
So he pulls Kovacs out of storage, and beams him all the way from Harlan’s World to Earth, because Kovacs is a very special kind of renegade, being an ex-UN Envoy. His Envoy training makes him a kind of super special forces soldier, able to be beamed from place to place and sleeve to sleeve and expected to perform on a moment’s notice. It also gives him a kind of hyper-absorptive intuition, an ability to assimilate local cultures and blend in, and also make impressive deductive leaps provided he has enough data. Kovacs is the best detective money and influence can buy, and Bancroft has bought him thoroughly — because if Kovacs doesn’t work for the Meth, he goes right back into storage.
That is merely the set-up for Altered Carbon, and the story twists and turns through the world of Bay City — formerly San Francisco — of a few hundred years from now. It is a world of AI-run hotels and virtual pornography, exotic street drugs and designer biochemtech bodies, of an assassin that only works with a copy of himself, an ancient aircraft carrier turned into a private gladiatorial theater, and of computer viruses that can destroy a person’s soul. It’s a place where you might kill someone and burn-out their stack one day and meet a copy of them the next with no hard feelings — after all, they don’t remember it. And Morgan uses every bit of this world’s potential in crafting a tightly woven and intricate mystery, a real page turner of a book that never dodges or excuses the ramifications of Altered Carbon’s established technology — and never ignores that, despite whatever radical transformations we may undergo, human nature remains fundamentally the same.
Kovacs is the book’s narrator, a character with more than a few surprises, capable of unexpected ruthlessness as well as compassion. He has an appealing voice that makes for an interesting character, one who is both an outsider to the planet he finds himself on and to the body he inhabits. And that new sleeve he’s wearing isn’t just a convenient, neurachem-enhanced body pulled out of storage for his use, but something that will further complicate his investigation, and his relationship with his chief ally Kristen Ortega, an officer of Bay City’s Organic Damage Division (in a world where Real Death is rare, crimes that were once homicides are now cases of organic damage). With every layer of complexity we learn more about Kovacs, and Morgan pulls us further into his world.
As a thriller, Altered Carbon delivers on all cylinders; tightly-woven and fast-paced with enough action, sex, and unforeseen twists to keep you turning the page. As science fiction of the cyberpunk school, it again succeeds, not only wowing us with invention, but integrating such things seamlessly into the story. In short, Altered Carbon is a stylish, compelling novel that will have broad appeal to readers that enjoy a double-helping of grit and adrenaline with their SF.
Altered Carbon is the first in a series of Takeshi Kovacs novels, and the story continues in Broken Angels, and Woken Furies.
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The best review I’ve seen of “Altered Carbon” yet. Thank you.
Thank you, Arshad — glad you enjoyed it.
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