Two cinematic points of reference occurred to me on my reading of Altered Carbon. The whole is self-consistent and convincing. Altered Carbon packs a wealth of gritty detail, incorporating ideas which, in many cases, are staples of SF but it’s at least a fresh mix, drawn with verve, wit, and insight, and some of Morgan’s extrapolations are genuinely new. The crime that frames Morgan’s book is a well-constructed problem, but ultimately its solution is secondary to the exploration of twenty-sixth century society that’s posited here. But if Kovacs has a problem with this cavalier treatment of his psyche, it soon transpires that his Earth-based sleeve has issues, and a history, of its own … Bancroft, it seems, has a whim to use Kovacs to investigate his murder. In Kovacs’ case, the resleeving is a bit more problematic: fatally shot in Harlan’s World, he’s revived in the body of an arrested criminal, 180 light years from his homeworld, in Bay City (formerly San Francisco) on Earth. In Bancroft’s case, the body is a clone of the ‘sleeve’ he was wearing at the time of his murder: no big, in effect, but he is curious to know who killed him. That these deaths are merely inconvenient, rather than being more individually limiting, is due to the consciousness-transferral technology known as ‘resleeving’, effectively a near-instantaneous personality and memory download into a freshly grown, or harvested, human body. At the start of the book, however, he has a problem: he too has got himself killed. Laurens Bancroft is an Earth-based Methuselah, a tercentarian multibillionaire able to afford essentially indefinite life extension (in a continually youthful body), and pretty much all of life’s other luxuries including, inevitably, the trophy wife.

At the start of the book, however, he has a problem: he’s just got himself killed. He has a wealth of elite military experience and neurological enhancements. Takeshi Kovacs is a UN Envoy-trained mercenary and petty criminal, operating on the planetary backwater of Harlan’s World.

It’s fast-paced, convoluted, violent and thoughtful. (Review first published on the ASIM website, December 2007)Īltered Carbon, Richard Morgan’s first novel, is one of the eight books that Gollancz has chosen to re-issue under their new ‘Future Classics’ tag.

Altered carbon morgan