Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon is an exciting SF/crime hybrid, with an intricate (but always plausible) plot, a powerful noir atmosphere, and enough explosive action to satisfy the most die-hard thriller fan. It's also an extremely well-crafted piece of fiction. For all the ultra-violence, there's no American movie-style overkill: the furious pace is balanced by contemplative passages, giving the reader a chance to take a breather. The writing is skillful, with elegant prose that lifts even the most gruesome scenes above the ordinary. And there's a depth to this novel, with its strong characterizations and thoughtful treatment of alienation and loss, that one doesn't find in the average thriller.

Especially impressive is the world building. Morgan's 25th century Earth is a fascinating construct, both in its vividly-depicted futuristic strangeness and in what, under all the technology, hasn't changed. Earth's complicated history, as well as the histories of a number of colony worlds, is revealed in controlled snippets throughout the book -- bits and pieces that solidly establish atmosphere and context, yet are glancing and elliptical, and leave much unexplained. For the most part this mosaic approach works very well -- after all, this sort of vibrant half-knowledge is exactly what one has about the real world. Only in the book's central premise is there a bit of a gap. There are hints as to why it might have been useful to develop a method to digitize human minds, but in real life, expensive technological solutions rarely trickle down to the poor and disenfranchised, and it's not entirely credible that digitization should be universal. Morgan does take care to draw distinctions between rich and poor -- there's a big difference between the re-sleeving options available to the wealthy Bancrofts and those available to Louise, a prostitute Kovacs encounters. Still, the ramifications of such a radical social change don't seem quite adequately elaborated.

Morgan also does a good job with his characters, who for the most part aren't particularly likeable, but are always understandable. With Kovacs he walks a thin line; it's not easy to convincingly portray a character who is brutally violent yet essentially honorable, profoundly alienated yet capable of compassion, possessed of supra-human abilities and yet prey to human frailties. Much of the time such characters wind up being Janus-like, their unmatching halves never meshing into a believable whole. But Morgan succeeds admirably in unifying Kovacs' different aspects, and even in making him sympathetic, in large part through Kovacs' haunted memories of his past, which form a melancholy refrain throughout the book.

Altered Carbon is a really impressive debut, an auspicious start to what (I'm assuming) will be an ongoing series. I look forward to seeing more from this talented author.
(c) Victoria Strauss