Altered Carbon

The central idea of the book is great, that is, in the future we are able to transfer our minds into other bodies (sleeves) and that permanent death is not so common anymore. I enjoyed the world building, a kind of dystopian future where crime is everywhere and there are powerful corrupt people involved in government and security issues. The plot of the book starts well as Kovaks, the anti-hero protagonist is appointed to carry on an investigation about the supposed suicide of a very rich and powerful man. The plot slowly becomes very intricated, and I confess that by the end of the book everything seemed way to complex for me to grasp.

A fantastic sci fi world that really drew me in with its initial premise. The story diverted quite a bit and it feels like the writer may well have not originally had the plot direction going the way it did when he began. However with interesting characters, continuing surprises and a, as aforementioned, fantastic sci-fi world, it kept me intrigued for the majority of the story.

Its hard to rate this book. I enjoyed the story. The characters were kind of bland, stock noir archetypes. I enjoyed the setting. The future jargon was a bit too far, I was still trying to decipher it by the end of the book. Because of the pace and the high bar set by the future jargon I wasn't reading this as fast as I normally do despite enjoying the book after I stopped reading it.

It is a conundrum. I gave this book 3 stars but really its like 3.7 stars. I will probably read another book set in this universe. I can only imagine it gets easier to parse and becomes more of a ride and less of a puzzle.

Mise à jour après une deuxième lecture :

C'est étrange comme on peut avoir un ressenti totalement différent sur le même livre à quelques mois d'intervalle. J'avais essayé de lire ce roman au début de l'année et j'avais renoncé après en avoir lu la moitié. Cette fois, j'ai été captivé par le récit dès le début et malgré une petite baisse d'intensité au milieu, j'ai tenu bon et j'ai pris dans cette deuxième lecture un plaisir que je n'avais pas connu la première fois. Comme quoi, il est parfois bon de laisse une seconde chance à un roman qui nous a déçu mais dont on perçoit un potentiel à côté duquel on est peut-être passé la première fois. C'est bien le cas ici, sans que je comprenne bien pourquoi. Sans doute une question d'état d'esprit au moment de la lecture.

Première critique après une première lecture :

Altered Carbon est le premier tome d'une trilogie de romans de l'écrivain britannique Richard K. Morgan. J'ai découvert cette oeuvre à travers son adaptation en série TV par Netflix : j'avais trouvé cela sympathique sans en garder non plus un souvenir inoubliable. Malgré tout, la lecture récente du jeu de rôles Eclipse Phase, inspiré notamment de l'imaginaire décrit par Richard K. Morgan dans Altered Carbon et ses suites, m'avait donné envie de plonger dans la trilogie.

Il faut d'abord avoir conscience d'une chose : Altered Carbon est un polar dans un univers de science-fiction transhumaniste. Dans ce futur imaginé, l'esprit d'un être humain peut être numérisé et transféré d'un corps à un autre : la mort n'est vraiment réelle que si on efface toutes les sauvegardes de l'esprit d'une personne. Les plus riches passent sans cette d'un corps à un autre et peuvent ainsi vivre jusqu'à trois siècles, quand les plus pauvres doivent travailler toujours plus dur pour disposer d'un corps correct.

Je dois également faire une remarque sur la structure du livre : contrairement à de nombreux romans parfaitement calibrés avec des chapitres de taille quasiment identiques, généralement entre 10 et 15 pages, celui-ci varie les plaisirs : certains chapitres atteignent tout juste 10 pages quand d'autres dépassent les 20 voire 25 pages. C'est déroutant quand on est habitué aux productions littéraires récentes où tout est finement calculé pour plaire au plus grand nombre, et c'est suffisamment notable pour que je le signale ici.

Malheureusement, un polar dans un univers de science-fiction reste un polar, et c'est un genre qui ne m'a jamais vraiment plu. Si j'ai aimé certains romans policiers old-school (Agatha Christie a bercé mon adolescence), j'ai toujours du mal avec les polars, leurs ambiances sombres et poisseuses, et les enquêtes qui avancent péniblement avec un détective plus ou moins antipathique.

Après avoir tenu plus de la moitié du livre, j'ai fini par renoncer. L'univers décrit par l'auteur est passionnant, il donne envie d'en savoir plus, mais le récit m'a littéralement ennuyé. J'ai tenté péniblement de passer outre en poursuivant ma lecture mais j'ai fini par me résoudre à abandonner, constatant avec amertume que ce livre n'est pas fait pour moi.

Je ne peux même pas dire que c'est un livre raté, ou de mauvaise qualité. Je suis bien incapable de juger s'il s'agit ou pas d'un bon polar. Par contre, je peux dire que le décalage – sans doute voulu par l'auteur – entre l'univers très inventif et le récit très classique n'a pas produit chez moi les effets désirés.

(As usual, I'll try to keep it non-spoilery to begin with, and then if I have to talk about spoilery things, I'll keep that for the end and with decent warning.)

I don't like to recap novels, you can go read what it's about somewhere else. But the short of it is it's a noir mystery novel set a few hundred years in the future, and told by the protagonist “detective,” Takeshi Kovacs. He's a reconditioned ex-special forces-esque soldier with a shadowy past, skeletons in closets, grudges tightly held, and a pencahant for losing his temper and killing people. But that's OK, sorta, because in the future, death is rarely permanent. Most everyone has a “stack,” a computer chip in the brain that holds their identity, memory, personailty, and should you die (and not be a Catholic), you can be re-sleeved in a new body. (So long as your stack remains undamaged. However, Kovacs ocassionally finds the need to damage stacks.) He's been given an offer he can't refuse, literally, to solve the suicide of a wealthy “Meth,” or a Methuselah – a person who's been around for a couple hundred years or so. Hired, of course, by the victim who doesn't believe his own death was a suicide.

And so begins Kovacs' tale of pavement-beating detective work while being gunned for by crazy assassins, tortured by people he gets in the way of, and involved in love affairs (or just pheromone-enhanced sexcapades) with girlfriends of the man whose body he's wearing and wives (singular, actually) of clients (also, singular). Yeah, it gets pretty crazy, plot-wise. But one of the great things about Altered Carbon is how it keeps the twists and turns well-organized, easy to follow (with some furrowed eyebrows), and more or less within the realm of internal consistency. Very impressive for a first novel, by the way!



(Pause for scene cut...) Yikes! Since I started this review, I've read and finished another novel and started another! If I'm going to have any hope of getting reviews out the door, I need to keep them quick and superficial.

So, general thoughts: Basically, Altered Carbon is like a marriage of a Charles Stross novel with early 80s William Gibson. Morgan creates a future world where, because of the ability to re-sleeve your mind, life has become cheap and the commodification of the human has reached an apex. Or at least a crisis moment. The plot is superficially a noir in which the hero is a reluctant near-anti-hero who, thanks to becoming a target of the “bad guys,” takes the case personally, and jumps from femme fatale to femme fatale to get closer to his goals.

The writing was extremely compelling, expertly balancing descriptive and utilitarian. Morgan writes so you can easily picture the people and places, almost smell and touch it. The pacing was excellent with even the “slow parts” situated and developed within the narrative so as to remain compelling. While it's a relatively thick novel, I read through it and a good clip, and never found myself lost or confused as to what was going on.

The posthuman elements and the depiction of future technology was quite convincing and believable, although we only see a very narrow slice of this future world, depicting both the lifestyles of the ultra-rich and the seedy underbelly of the dispossessed and terminally exploited. Nothing of the in-between classes.

And, for that matter, neither did the early cyberpunk of Gibson. His goal was to show the machinations and motivations of the corporate capitalists which controlled humanity, and the lower-class of people who were the only ones with the relative freedom to fight the system. Altered Carbon inhabits the same essential world.

In closing, I had dog-eared a few pages where something that resonated with my Marxist-materialist Critical Theory outlook jumped out at me. Granted, the entire novel is a critique of postmodern capitalism (again, just as cyberpunk in general is), but here are a few passages that really stood out. Instead of commenting on them, I present them as-is:

But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anenome, cut up on a surgical platter; about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be re-sleeved; Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months; Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung-heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay. (437)

“The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times.” (491-92)

“Kristin, nothing ever does change.” I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. “You'll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don't have to think for themselves. You'll always have people like Kawahara and the Bancrofts to push their buttons and cash in on the program. People like you to make sure the game runs smoothly and the rules don't get broken too often. And when the Meths want to break the rules themselves, they'll send people like Trepp and me to do it. That's the truth, Kristin. It's been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago and from what I read in the history books, it's never been any different. Better get used to it.” (524)

Romanul a fost promovat ca cyber-noir - de fapt, este 10% cyber și 90% noir.
Dacă vă place genul policier, merită citit, este un noir scris foarte corect, cu bifarea majorității șabloanelor genului și cu o intrigă relativ complexă, care nu permite ghicirea criminalului. În unele privințe mi-a amintit de The Expanse, mai ales în atmosferă. Dacă v-a plăcut Expanse, o să vă placă și CM. Mie nu-mi plac policier-urile, deci m-a ratat (și plictisit) cu brio.
Dacă îl aveți în vedere ca cyberpunk, din punctul meu de vedere puteți să-l săriți: are câteva idei originale, dar cyberpunk-ul este doar fundal și decor, ratându-și complet condiția sa principală, după cum observa și Florin Pîtea la el pe blog, și anume rolul de comentariu social.
În plus, aici (fiind debutul său) Richard Morgan nu e prea eficient cu scriitura - motiv din care vă recomand ca alternativă ”Omul Negru” - mai matur, mai bine scris, mai cyber și da, mai comentariu social. Pe acela îl consider de 5+/5, așa că rămân fan Morgan și după această nepotrivire de caracter cu CM.

I tend to fall victim to getting excited about books that I haven't read after I see gushing praise for them and this was one of those books.

Altered Carbon was pretty good, don't get me wrong, but I was expecting more out of it, which might be a bit unfair to the author. It was some pretty bleak noir, which I'm cool with, and the future that Morgan built that involved human consciousness being digitized and transferred between bodies was an interesting idea. Of course, it creates some problems as well and Morgan was able to handle those issues rather deftly, which I commend.

Something about the story and the characters fell a bit flat in the middle, everything there but just a bit subdued. I think it had a lot to do with the absolute glee and care that was put into the violent scenes about mid-way through the book that everything else afterwards felt flat in comparison. It was like you were shown just how good Morgan can be, then never lives up to that potential again until moving into the home stretch.

I didn't realise that this was a debut novel until i finished it and started reading reviews. That made this book pretty impressive, as i thoroughly enjoyed. The author tells a noir tale in a science fiction setting where mankind has figured how to cheat death by “sleeving” one's consciousness into bodies, real or synthetic. As long as you can accept that premise without trying to find flaws with that idea, this will be the “magic” of this book - where it truly shines - the world-building.

Throughout the story, we get glimpses of this world (or worlds as the case may be) that's being unfolded slowly. How humanity has spread, how humanity's brutality and cruelty has reared itself again and again. How advanced mankind has become, yet doing the same things to each other as we're doing now. I found that the most interesting bit is not the thought-provoking idea of “resleeving”, but rather the implications surrounding it. The author injects that throughout the story; showing you the practical applications of such a technology, and at the same time shines a little light on the morality of it.

The protagonist is an anti-hero that I readily got into and liked, a specially trained war veteran thrust into the midst of a conspiracy, and then determined that he didn't like it. It paints a gritty noir setting, complete with violence and sexual themes, but in sometimes rather imaginative futuristic flair.

If i have to dislike something, I guess there parts in the book that feels like it could be trimmed or cut as it detracts from the main plot. But I didn't mind because I really enjoy good world-building. Another less satisfactory bit is how the story was wrapped up. It's not that it left loose ends - i don't think it did - it's just that the last chapter and the epilogue felt rather rushed. After all the careful plot building and conspiracy unraveling, I guess it could've been better.

On the whole, this was a very enjoyable book for me and sent me into thought-provoking discussions of the ideas in this book.

I ended up with very mixed feelings on this book. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the idea of “re-sleeving” and the transfer of consciousness across worlds. The ways society has made use of this technology, the way not everyone can afford it, the use in military form, all that was interesting, thoughtful and often just downright cool.

A lot of the rest of the book got on my nerves though. It's written in noir style, and there seems to be an inherent sexism in the genre. Morgan uses the “I'm so angry with you, let's have sex!” trope that I hate more than anything. The sex scenes themselves were way more graphic than I was anticipating and honestly pretty awkward. Some on the S&L forums described the book as “harem anime” and that isn't too far off. Still not sure what Trepp's deal is, which is a shame because she was the most interesting character for me.

I'm leaving it at three stars because it's not badly written. It just makes use of a few tropes and tricks that do nothing for me. If you're very into noir sci-fi and don't mind the occasional X-rated incident, give this book a try. I think I've just read a bit too much in that style lately to really enjoy this one.

One of my pet peeves are bullshit sex scenes. Is sex scenes? Whatever. Altered Carbon has one early on that really grated on my nerves. And then, somehow, redeems it later on with another one that isn't pointless because of the counter balance provided by the early one.

I respect how Morgan did what he did, but that doesn't mean I liked it.

Altered Carbon is a futuristic science fiction noir-ish detective novel. It follows Takeshi Kovacs, an off-world criminal/detective with militaristic Envoy training, as he attempts to solve the "murder" of one of Earth's oldest and wealthiest citizens. Kovacs lives in a future where a person's identity can be downloaded, backed up, and re-sleeved in different bodies to allow them a perpetual existence, if they can afford the cost. The wealthiest have multiple cloned sleeves, and automatic mental back-ups at regular intervals. The poorest can sometimes afford a new synthetic sleeve, but more often spend time on stack - a virtual holding ground for those without physical bodies. In a world where one can live forever, "real death" is hard to come by, though some choose it for religious reasons. Murder is more of an inconvenience than a finality - memory between the last backup and time of death is lost, but as long as the virtual memory center is intact, revival is a straightforward option.There are a lot of fascinating ideas and themes presented in this book. The concept of re-sleeving allows one to ponder what it would be like to adjust to and live in another person's body. How much does the physical body have to do with relationships, and how much of it is based on the personality? The idea that we choose our friends and partners based on personality is nice notion, but biochemistry plays a large part as well, and this book looks at that in an interesting roundabout way. Also, having recently read [b:Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 29587 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Cory Doctorow https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1406608958s/29587.jpg 1413] by Cory Doctorow, it was interesting to see several of the same themes and ideas presented in slightly different ways. I feel like Altered Carbon has the more realistic presentation - with economics playing a larger factor - and that the presentation of the themes were a bit more subtle and woven into the story. The themes were a bit more obvious in Down and Out, but I also feel that in some instances they were a bit more flushed out as well.The story itself was entertaining, though the “detective” parts of the story did seem to take large logical leaps at times. I was never board, and at times fully engrossed while reading this book. There was perhaps a bit more sex and violence than I would normally read, though I do admit they were important plot points in the story, so it wasn't entirely gratuitous. I liked it more than I expected I would, and thought the writing itself was pretty good. It isn't the typical type of story I tend to read (I usually go more for epic fantasy and space operas), but I found myself really enjoying the world this book creates nonetheless. I also like that the author has set up his world so that his main character can easily go anywhere (through digital mental transfers) and become anybody (with re-sleeving). It gives a Quantum Leap type ability to tell the story from different perspectives that I find very fun. It also means that, although this is a series, it would be very easy to set up each of the sequels to be entirely different from the story presented in the first novel. The book felt very self-contained. I could see myself reading the sequel novels in the future, but I don't feel like I need to read them immediately, because I feel like I have already read a complete story. It is a nice change of pace from a lot of the other books I have been reading lately. I mean, I love a good series, but sometimes it is nice to not have to read several thousand pages to get a sense of completion satisfaction.Overall I have to say I really enjoyed this book. It was a fun story with some interesting ideas. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely worth the read for fans of science fiction or detective stories.

Death, where is thy sting?

I watched the Netflix series a bit ago, so reading the book seemed like the next logical step. I love those old detective noir mystery atmospheres, I love cyberpunk atmospheres, and the idea that your consciousness can be transferred (“re-sleeved”) as often as you have the cash for it makes for an interesting premise. This seemed like a slam dunk for me.

In many ways it was. Kovacs is very much an anti-hero; you're supposed to dislike him. I liked the moral ambiguity he brought to the story, and his jaded war vet background made for some interesting philosophical considerations he has throughout the story. I liked being strung along on this cyberpunk mystery full of people with too much cash and not a lot of perspective left after being re-sleeved for over a century. I liked the gritty action, the take on a futuristic America, all of it. I had a lot of fun reading this book.

I think my only real miss is the ending. To keep it vague (since this is a mystery at its core), all throughout the first 80-85% of the book the author keeps you very informed as to what the main character is doing, what they're thinking, the connections they're making with regards to the mystery they're unraveling, and it feels like you're right there with him in this investigation. Just when you start closing in on the ending though, the author starts skipping whole scenes that you know are taking place, all in the name of preserving The Big Reveal. Don't get me wrong, the pieces are all put back in place for you at the end, but tonally it felt like the ending was played out of order in terms of putting the pieces together. A very minor quibble, I know.

This book is very much one of those either you love or you hate, from reading the other reviews. And I really, really liked it.

I wasn't really impressed with this one. It was a bit over the top for me, and I kind of just wanted it to end. That being said, I really enjoyed the world building–it was innovative and I think this would make a very interesting movie.

I do not plan to read the rest of this series. Great concept and the book had it's moments for me, but overall it was lacking in execution.