I admit that I find Gibson to be rather oblique reading. I first read Neuromancer for CBR IV, and I wasn’t really motivated to read the rest of the Sprawl books for a number of reasons. But I really like the *idea* of cyberpunk, and after watching Netflix’s Altered Carbon I thought I might give some abandoned cyberpunk series another chance, including this one and, yeah, the Takeshi Kovacs books. I don’t remember Neuromancer all too well, but from what I do remember, some of […]
“Get to the next screen”
What does society look like if your consciousness can be saved to a device and installed into a new body making death theoretically impossible? While this sounds like the plot of an episode of Black Mirror, it’s actually the main conceit of Altered Carbon, published in 2006 (and adapted into a series on Netflix this year). At birth, every human has a cortical stack implanted at the base of the skull that contains their consciousness. Only the destruction of the stack results in what’s […]
Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt
This is a noir, cyber-punk, mystery and has a lot of great ideas jammed into it, but I don’t think the execution is quite there. Ashby does play a bit with the noir tropes, reversing roles and changing the tone to be a bit more humorous and I liked that quite a bit, however there’s just so much in the novel that nothing really gets done well. There are a lot of characters, a lot of plot, and a lot of genres all fighting for […]
“Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin.”
3.5 stars Altered Carbon is a technically great book that I liked, but didn’t completely click for me in a way that I expected it to. Its premise drew me in, and the stylistic excellence of Richard K. Morgan’s prose lends itself equally well to technobabble, gritty noir dialogue, and surrealism. He’s also created a compelling, hyper-competent lead character in Takeshi Kovacs, who plays up the strong and silent thing to great effect but also employs cutting, dark humor with aplomb. The idea is this: […]