{"id":565,"date":"2006-09-04T11:10:59","date_gmt":"2006-09-04T11:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/04\/richard-morgan-altered-carbon\/"},"modified":"2006-09-04T11:10:59","modified_gmt":"2006-09-04T11:10:59","slug":"richard-morgan-altered-carbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/04\/richard-morgan-altered-carbon\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon [Library of Babel]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking of “Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions,” some time back, I read Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon<\/strong><\/cite>, but never got around to booklogging it. In many ways, it’s similar to the Asher book, though, so I might as well take care of it today.<\/p>\n

This is the first of a series of books following the exploits of Takeshi Kovacs, who may or may not be a UN Special Envoy (it’s a little unclear to me what his exact status is). He’s an unpleasant fellow with a lot of blood on his hands, who has been hired to investigate a murder.<\/p>\n

Of course, as in any private-eye novel, things quickly turn out to be more complicated than that. In this world, consciousness can be tranferred from one body to another, with bodies being referred to as “sleeves.” The body Kovacs is using turns out to have a history, which gets him some unwanted attention, and brings in some unpleasant elements who just might be involved in the original killing. And, of course, his employer’s motivations are somewhat questionable, and he’s not sure who he can trust, etc.<\/p>\n

Morgan does a good job of translating the violent amoral private eye genre into a science fiction context– think Robert B. Parker’s Spenser with body-swapping and less armchair psycholanalysis. It’s pretty bleak and very violent, but the story is well done. I’ll probably wait for the others to hit mass-market paperback, rather than the trade paper of this edition, but they’ll make good airplane reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of “Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions,” some time back, I read Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, but never got around to booklogging it. In many ways, it’s similar to the Asher book, though, so I might as well take care of it today. This is the first of a series of books following… Continue reading Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon [Library of Babel]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}