This 2002 debut novel from Richard K. Morgan is a blast, combining Dashiel Hammet (down to its primary setting of San Francisco) and Bruce Sterling/William Gibson into a highly readable medium future melange highly reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick (whose fiction was the basis for movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and the upcoming Nicholas Cage-starrer Next). In fact, it won the 2003 Phillip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel originally published in the US as a paperback. Morgan is yet another topnotch British author.
Altered Carbon is the first part of a trilogy (fortunately the others are already out and in paperback) about Takeshi Kovacs set about 500 years from now. Key science fiction elements:
- Altered carbon, devised perhaps three centuries before this story opens and which Morgan does not explain at all, allows for cloning/quick growth of new bodies, though it remains expensive and so not generally available. Similarly sophisticated chemical engineering is also practiced.
- Cortical stacks, implanted at the base of the brain, store the essence of one’s self so one can be transferred to another body–either an altered carbon-based clone or the body of a person currently ‘in storage’ for being convicted of a crime, popularly referred to as sleeves. The stacks allow the criminal’s essence to be stored on computer disk for the term of the sentence with no guarantee of the original body’s availability afterwards since sentences can run more than a hundred years.
- AIs, intelligent computers, exist but in limited numbers and tightly controlled circumstances. Kovacs stays in The Hendrix, a hotel controlled (inhabited?) by one.
- Humans have settled several worlds beyond Earth through slower than light travel, Takeshi having been born on Harlan’s World, but instantaneous communication permits a single, United Nations-derived government as well as the transmission of stored essences for download into a local sleeve.
Indeed, a needlecast is what brings Kovacs to Earth. Our man is an extremely tough guy over a hundred years old (though he’s only experienced about 40, the rest having past in storage), born into a ghetto gang and escaping into the UN military where he’s eventually drafted into the Envoy Corps, an elite force combining diplomatic psychology, chemically-enhanced body control and special forces training. Envoy work is soul-destroying and since most jobs are out of bounds because of the perceived advantages the enhancements give, many turn to crime after leaving the service.
A wealthy methuselah, a person named Laurens Bancroft who’s lived 350 years continuously through a series of altered carbon clones, pays for Kovacs to be transmitted and resleeved in order to investigate why Bancroft seemingly killed himself just before. Having multiple clones and automatic stack backups the body death only cost him two days of memories but he can’t accept the explanation that he did it to himself, the ‘meth’ unable to conceive of any logical explanation.
Kovacs being who he is and Bancroft having resleeved him in the body of a corrupt police detective called Ryker, the path from arrival to uncovering the truth and the actions taken in reponse is engagingly tangled. We travel from the ultra-privileged through police working in an ultimately corrupt democratic regime down through the least privileged strata and back up to the level of global politics, our protagonist moving ruthlessly to earn his promised payment while trying to help the downtrodden he encounters and hurt their abusers.
Morgan has done well in embedding the hardboiled noir detective work, giving us multiple beautiful (and intelligent) women, dangerous red herrings, antagonists from both Kovacs’ and Ryker’s pasts and an answer to the why that makes sense but was unpredictable. The writing is colorful, the plot swirling excellently tighter and tighter and the characters compelling making it difficult for me to put Altered Carbon down.
definitely recommended
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