Altered Carbon (edit title)

• Rated 4 stars

“I red this book in French (ISBN 978-2-8112-00058-9”

• Rated 5 stars

“I picked this book off of the library's shelf at random, just based off the title. Wow. Just...wow. A pitch-perfect blend of dystopia, hyper-tech, and noir. One of my favorite protagonists, just for being the bastard he is. I had a quick "WTF?" moment with the description of the cortical stacks and how your personality could be shifted around, but once I just let it go as a story element I was hooked. I wish the rest of the Takeshi Kovacs series could be as good as this one, but I guess catching lightning in a bottle a second time really is that difficult. One of my top ten books.”

• Rated 0 stars

“My Favorite Book! Hands Down!”

• Rated 4 stars

“There is nothing really new in the SF meets noir detective novel. On the noir side, there is the cynical, hard-boiled detective unwillingly drawn in to the machinations of the powerful; there are the beautiful women embroiled in the case in varying degrees, nearly all of whom eventually get bedded; there is the city filled to the brim with drug dealers, whorehouses, and little people being eaten up by the powerful. On the SF side, there are hints of an ancient galactic civilization, now defunct; there are guns and computer programs to do anything anyone could want; there are A.I.s, particularly The Hendrix, which is a fabulous invention; and of course, there is the ubiquitous process of resleeving, by which death has been conquered – for the rich. Even the melding of the two genres is not new: it dates back at least to Isaac Asimov’s Elijah Bailey/R. Daneel Olivaw novels.

What Altered Carbon provides, however, is all of those familiar elements done up in a superb style. It is an extraordinarily visual book – I understood from the first page of the prologue why Joel Silver and Warner Bros. bought the film rights for $1 million. The narrative is fast-paced, the tone is spot-on, and the philosophical musings, while also not ground-breaking in any way, are moments to savor rather than skip over. The mystery is satisfyingly twisty but still fair to the reader, and the final confrontation ratchets up the tension to a screaming pitch then uses the bare minimum of words to choreograph the denoument. Really an impressive first novel, and one I heartily enjoyed.

I do have one quibble, however: I read the author bio in the back of the book first, and two of the three sentences were about the film rights. I found this a tad tasteless, not very informative, and kind of distracting, as I spent the entire novel trying to imagine how someone would film it.”

• Rated 4 stars

“A quasi-cyberpunk hard core sci-fi set in a future where peoples memories and personalities are uploadable into "stacks" for storage, torture or interrogation and downloadable into "sleeves" for another go at a mortal life. This is not a beautiful, utopian world, it is more a dysfunctional place where people like Tashaki Kovac's are "envoys" quasi-military enforcers now a master criminal on the run who is recruited or forced to find out who killed someone on earth. The truth is found under a multitude of layers that Kovacs digs up, some using that envoy intution, some just using his face as a punching bag to find. A good, engrossing read.”

• Rated 5 stars

“A novel which, besides being astonishingly good, was for me truly inspirational, validating everything I'd been wanting to write for the last few years. Running flat out along the sharpest edge of gritty, contemporary sci-fi, and yet still finding time to highlight several moral and philosophical dilemmas, starting with our eternal soul and moving along from there. I can't recommend it highly enough.”

• Rated 3 stars

“Very uneven. I finished it but feel no need to read the next two he wrote about this character.”

• Rated 0 stars

“In the novel's quasi-cyberpunk and somewhat dystopian world, human personalities can be stored digitally and downloaded into new bodies, called sleeves. Most people have stacks in their spinal columns that store their memories. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely. Catholics have arranged that they will not be resleeved as they believe that the soul goes to Heaven when they die, and so would not pass on to the new sleeve. This makes Catholics targets for murder, since killers know their victim will not be resleeved to testify. A UN resolution to alter this legal position forms one strand of the novel's plot, in order to allow the authorities to temporarily sleeve a deceased Catholic woman to testify in a murder trial.

Most people cannot afford to get resleeved more than once per lifetime, so while some people can live indefinitely, only the wealthy are able to acquire replacement bodies on a continual basis. The long-lived are called Meths, short for Methuselahs. The very rich are also able to keep copies of their minds in remote storage, which they update every so often. This ensures that even if their stack is destroyed, they can be resleeved.

One such Methuselah--a man named Laurens Bancroft--has apparently committed suicide. He is resleeved from a backup, but his other stack was destroyed. Because his stack is on a 48 hour back-up schedule, he has no memories of his actions during the previous 48 hours. He believes his apparent suicide was actually a murder and hires Takeshi Kovacs to investigate his death.

Kovacs was an Envoy, a member of a military unit formed to cope with the challenge of interstellar warfare. Faster-than-light travel is only possible by transmitting a digitally stored consciousness across space into a new sleeve. Transmitting normal soldiers in this way would severely inhibit their effectiveness, since they would have to cope with a new body while fighting. To combat this, Envoy training emphasises mental techniques necessary to survive in different bodies over physical strength, and the sleeve in which they are transmitted has special neuro-chemical sensors which amplify the power of the five senses, intuition and physical capabilities. The effectiveness of the Envoy Corps' training is such that Envoys are banned from holding governmental positions on most worlds.

Kovacs, killed in the novel's prologue and stored in digital form, is downloaded into a sleeve formerly inhabited by Bay City (formerly San Francisco) policeman Elias Ryker. The plot unfolds through Kovacs' narrative. Kovacs eventually solves the mystery, but only after great personal suffering which he is able to bear only because of his Envoy training.

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• Rated 0 stars

“Adults only, and even then not for the faint of heart.”

• Rated 5 stars

“my favorite book of all time period!!! o.k. o.k. my favorite so far.”