“Godly good gods, is “Altered Carbon” as kick-ass as it seems? I’m only asking since it seems so very unlikely that anything actually can kick this amount of ass and not make the world implode with its sheer awesomeness. Please gods, if you can take the time out of your day to get back to me on this issue, I’d be beyond thankful.”

Yes, dear readers, this week I had the honour of reading Richard Morgan’s classic SF thriller, “Altered Carbon”. Imagine it as “Blade Runner” meets “Jason Bourne” meets Quentin Tarantino on crack, and you’ve just begun to scrape the top off its magnitude of ridiculous divineness. It’s far from a flawless read, but as debut novels goes, it comes pretty darn close.

“Altered Carbon” is set in the far future of the 26th century. The human race has experienced a development beyond anyones wildest dreams; we’ve conquered space, inhabited its planets and we’ve been able to digitize the human mind. One of the consequences of this last discovery is that it makes us able to travel between the human worlds faster than you can blink your eye. However, the other, and more important effect, is that this technology makes you nearly immortal. If you have enough money, you can transfer your consciousness to a different body, be it previously someones else’s, a clone of yourself or maybe even a synthetic body.

Our main character is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s brought to Earth - now something of a human backwater - by Laurens Bancroft who wants him to investigate his own suicide. Bancroft is one of Earth’s most influential and richest people, and he’s several centuries old. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to commit suicide since he’d only be revived in a new clone a day later. But the circumstances are such that the police can’t see any other possibility, so Bancroft brings in Kovacs all the way from storage in Harlan’s World. If anyone should be able to dig up the truth, it should be a former Envoy (top soldiers of the human government) and an intergalactic rumored pain-in-the-ass.

The scene is set, but as the plots and intrigues thickens, Takeshi Kovacs will find himself regretting ever having come to the hell hole named Earth.

Some of you may remember that Richard Morgan’s novel “Black Man” got the questionable honour of being my “Most Disappointing Novel” of 2007. The weird thing about that book was that I was enjoying it tremendously until I had to put it down for a week, but when I picked it up again, I couldn’t seem to shake thee feeling that it was one of the most bloated SF thrillers I’ve ever read. Naturally, I was a bit confused as to how something like that could happen. One moment I was thinking: “This is so f*cking awesome!” and the next I had to force myself into finishing it, thinking that I could shake the boredom if I just read one chapter more.

The obvious answer to this conundrum was that my pause had somehow ruined the experience of the book for me. Richard Morgan is such an acclaimed and beloved author that I couldn’t let a faulty decision on my part ruin my enjoyment of his work, so I decided that I should pick up his debut novel, “Altered Carbon”, and see what I made of it.

And as you’ve probably concluded by now: I loved every second of it. The prologue hooked me with its breathtaking pace and snappy dialog, and from there on out all I could do was to grab a hold and pray that this 534 pages long roller coaster wouldn’t buck me off.

Richard Morgan is known for his fantastic action scenes, but what I really enjoyed was the prose, which was something of a surprise to me. My heart raced every time there was a gun fight or such like, but the tone and setting that Morgan managed to convey was a much sweeter fix. At one point I wanted to slot in “Blade Runner”, but I figured that there wasn’t any need - I was already hearing the cyber-noir soundtrack in my mind.

Another thing that impressed me was the characterization. Takeshi Kovacs is a wonderfully flawed protagonist. I especially enjoyed his more schizophrenic scenes where his experiences from the Sharya war were revealed and fleshed out. The rest of the cast where also very good, but I have to make a special mention of “The Hendrix” - the A.I. that controlled the hotel where Kovacs lived. He was hands-down the best hotel-character I’ve ever read ^^

The only thing that kinda bugged me about this novel was the whole detective angle that Morgan deployed. He did it very well, but I’ve read so many of these now that I’m starting to get pretty bored with them. I also thought that he placed a tad too much focus on the whole “death is of no consequence” thing. It is a highly interesting premise that would naturally take up a lot of space if it ever existed, but I still felt that the author should have made himself a few more riffs to complete the symphony.

However, aside from those reservations, “Altered Carbon” is bloody amazing. It’s a fast paced, well-plotted, character driven and deep novel that will stick with me for a long, long time. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and I figure that if I ever reread “Black Man”, I’d discover that it actually is a fantastic book. “Altered Carbon” certainly is, and you should make a point of reading it sooner rather than later.

9.0 /10