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Title: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan ISBN: 0-345-45768-4 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.34 (64 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: The Phillip Marlow of the Future
Comment: The film noir of Cyber-punk!! I could hardly put this book down. The ideas in this book about cloning, digital consciousness, body modification, and immortality made for fresh and exciting read.

And even if there was no "sci-fi" part of the book, the "mystery" of this book, I feel, held its own in the mystery genre. The plot moved smooth and steady with no "slow" spots. I think being written in first-person made the mystery more entertaining than if it would have been in third-person.

Richard Morgan did a great job of not giving too much away but keeping the reader interested with great ending. For those of you out there in cyberspace that love sci-fi and love a good mystery, this is a must read!!!!!!

Rating: 4
Summary: Surprisingly good for a first novel
Comment: Mr. Morgan surprised me with the quality of his language, depth of character development, and off-handed technical understanding. To explain this last item, I've found that many new SF writers get overexcited by the wonders of whatever world they are exploring. For "Altered Carbon"'s characters, the technology that 2004's most powerful people would beg for is as widely-understood and understated as microwave ovens.

A note of caution to timid and/or young readers: this book gets very precisely violent at least a dozen times and very sensuous at least five. Murder, war, rape, corruption, and rotted love are the grit of the story, and double(and triple)speak is common. The lies and colorations of the dialogue is sometimes difficult to follow, as there are more than twenty major characters (i.e. with at least a page of dialogue and a wish to kill the narrator at one time or another :) ).

Perhaps another note of caution is the constant reminder of the narrator's status as an intelligent soldier - there is a great deal of musing and reciting from warrior doctrine. If you were annoyed by the "propaganda" in "Starship Troopers", your patience will be severely tested by "Altered Carbon".

The narrator, Takeshi Kovacs, is a James Bond without the dashing good looks or tact. His training (and former job) was Envoy of the United Nations, a doublespeak word for exterminator/guerilla/ninja. Since actually sending an army through space is not feasible for timing reasons (I believe the idea was "they'd get there in time to interrogate the rebel's grandchildren"), the U.N.'s armies are conveyed digitally over near-instantaneous communications and placed inside dormant bodies to fight insurgents. Criminals' minds are put into storage, and their original bodies are often put to good use reviving those whose bodies have died. The basis of all of this is the "stack", a small, armored piece of diamondoid circuitry that records the states of the brain it's implanted in. The narrator (and most of the rest of the characters) have switched bodies often enough to call them "sleeves". Takeshi is hired in the first chapter to find the killer of a very powerful man on Earth.

This is a detective story, and if you like detective stories (like me) you just might read all 300-odd pages in 22 hours. The "truth" revealed at the end is a superb summation of the evils that can accumulate in a world where it's difficult to die.

One obvious editing problem appeared: a name appeared in the last chapter which hadn't been used before; it referred to a victim who had several names already for business reasons. Otherwise, characters grew like wild roses : in bursts whenever you're not looking.

Overall, this book is an excellent read and a worthy volume to go beside my Gibson and Niven. Mr. Morgan hasn't reached Asimov status in my eyes yet, but the next book is due 2 March, and I can't wait.

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent science fiction/cyberpunk combo
Comment: In the 25th Century, life and death have become controlled and a person can be "resleeved" into a new body. This and much more in this combination high-tech/cyberpunk with far-reaching galactic sci-fi make this as intriguing and entertaining a work as "Foundation", "Stranger in a Strange Land", "Neuromancer", "Snow Crash", "Cryptonomicon", and "Darkeye: Cyber Hunter". A definite must-read.

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