Altered Carbon

From the first moment, I felt inextricably drawn to Takeshi Kovacs, the main protagonist of Altered Carbon. I’m more of a true-blue Captain America sort of guy myself. Kovacs is not.

Desperate, brutal, vengeful, and broken, Altered Carbon’s MC carries the weight of the story with incredible power. Plus, I really enjoyed the blend of dystopia and detective Noir found in this story. Required reading for any cyberpunk fan.

Some of my favorite sci-fi noir comes from deep inside the cyberpunk genre. This one has it all: a gritty investigation, a morally struggling protagonist, a broken society. What I like about this book is the complex interplay of technology and religion.

This is a world where a person can put on another body the way we might wear a different suit. Simmering in the background of it is this question of identity and the soul. Moral and spiritual questions combine to make a rich and powerful read, and it’s full of incredible action.

This book is now widely recognized and has received a two-season arc on Netflix. Nevertheless, I read it before the Netflix transition and found it to be a wonderful presentation of certain aspects of mind uploading, most notably the ability to survive capricious bodily death due to easily removable artificial brains (essentially mind uploads).

I also appreciated the depiction of interstellar travel via beamed brain state data files, although in a faster-than-light fashion necessitated by the story’s parallel narratives on worlds scattered throughout the cosmos. Frankly, the most enjoyable aspect of it is the style of writing, which has a… show more.

What I like most about this novel is how well crafted it is and the pure imagination behind it. The plot is a usual noir mystery, with the mystery actually remaining as such until the end. The characters are also fantastic and completely believable.

I really enjoyed how the story explored the implications of a transhuman world where individuals can transfer their thoughts, memories, and even personalities into different bodies based on their financial means. 

This book is pure cyberpunk.

Humans who can afford it can store their consciousness in a device at the base of their brain, which can be downloaded into a new body (called a “sleeve”) later on. Death no longer exists. Our protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, a specially-trained soldier, has been killed before. He’s dispatched to investigate the mysterious death of an aristocrat. No surprise, there is a greater conspiracy at play.

If consciousness can be digitized, bought, and sold, what is the true essence of a real person anymore? 

The protagonist of this book is Takeshi Kovacs, a former UN elite soldier turned private investigator. He’s old, or, to be precise, his mind has been around for decades, kept in ‘storage,’ a form of virtual prison. He is ‘decanted’ from storage and put into a body–a ‘sleeve,’ a temporary residence that he may get to keep if he does this one job: solving a seemingly unsolvable murder. 

Fifteen years ago, when I first read it, Altered Carbon showed me cyberpunk still had something to say. I wasn’t a writer then and hadn’t even considered being a writer, but I… show more.

I didn’t want to like cyberpunk (I have a few author friends who work in that genre), but I dipped an enhanced toe into Altered Carbon and was blown away. Immortality provided through cortical stacks and swapping bodies?

I was an immediate convert. I’m obsessed with over-population stories, and although I was a tiny bit disappointed that Morgan included colony planets, I found his universe compelling and disturbing, and I wanted in! Yes, I’d like the chance to live another life or two because it might allow me to do things differently; however, Morgan’s characters are stubbornly set in their… show more.

There are very few books that I read twenty years ago and still remember. This is one because the speculative concept is striking.

Takeshi Kovacs is a private investigator living in a future where people travel between worlds by swapping their minds into new bodies. Uniquely, he is hired to investigate the murder of a billionaire – by the murder victim himself. Yet again, it is a first-class crime story that also makes you think.