Book 38

"Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

My luck with picking good books (as noticed by fatfingers) continues. Although I can't be said to have picked this book, so much as had someone tell me it was awesome and go and buy me a copy.

The basic genre? Think cyber-punk meets Raymond Chandler. We have high tech, extreme violence and sex, coupled with drug use and exploration of what it means to be human, but we also have a locked room murder mystery with a dogged PI and hard-nosed police.

The basic storyline? An ex-special forces criminal is caught in a raid and leased by a rich industrialist on earth to find out why he (the industrialist) committed suicide. You see, in this future most people are implanted with a memory unit, or "stack", that records their memories and personality so that if their body (or "sleeve") is damaged or killed, they can just be put in a new one. We call that "resleeving". While most people just have their own stack, the mega-rich can afford off-site backups (every two to seven days) and so even if their stacks are destroyed (something which equals Real Death for most people), then their back-ups can be sleeved. With me so far? Well our industrialist - who, by the way, is about 300 years old - had his whole head lasered off from the neck up. No stack and so no memory of what happened, cause he lost his head about 44hours or so after his last backup. The police believe it was suicide, but he doesn't think anything could happen in that time to make him want to kill himself. Enter our hero, more or less shanghaied from the far corner of the galaxy, and cue the murder mystery.

Morgan writes action sequences better than almost anyone else I have ever read. His story fair cracks along, with near-perfect pacing and some genuine laughs (and cringes) along the way. The twists in the story aren't exactly heart-stoppingly unexpected, but the construction and flow of the tale do mean they all make sense in the logic of the narrative. The characters are wonderfully grey in their construction and actions, making me wish I had this one for my Masters exegesis. The post-hero of this novel (Takeshi Kovacs by name) and Jack Bauer would probably get on quite well. Provided they were on the same side.

Expect to see the two other novels Morgan has written turn up on this list (or next year's), and go out and buy this book.

Four derms of tatrewhatsitsname out of five.