'Altered Carbon' by Richard K. Morgan
'Altered Carbon' by Richard K. Morgan

The good

  • A deeply intriguing premise: a future where your consciousness can be stored digitally, so if your body dies, you can be downloaded into a new body, or “sleeve” (what a term!). The book has a lot of fun with this premise, exploring the psychology of waking up in a new body (and perhaps a new gender), the social impact of humans being able to achieve near immortality, but only if they are rich enough, the ethical impact of making multiple copies of your consciousness, and so on.

  • Lots of fun actions sequences.

  • Interesting, unpredictable characters.

The not so good

  • The plot is really, really convoluted. The book is based around a single, central mystery that the main character (Kovacs) is trying to unravel, and while it starts out like a fun detective story initially, there are just so many layers of secrets, deceit, misdirection, and conspiracy, that I found myself getting quite lost. The final reveal mostly makes sense, but I found it a bit too complicated to be satisfying.

Rating: 4 stars