Altered Carbon: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel by Richard K. Morgan (5 stars)

Fans of Chandler and sci-fi rejoice! Your dreams are answered in this noir sci-fi detective novel set in future San Francisco (now known as Bay City), where bodies are just 'sleeves' to insert your cortical stack into, and, for enough money, you can live forever. One of the super-rich elite known as 'meths' (after Methuselah longevity) forcefully enlists the help of Takeshi Kovacs, a futuristic detective with grit, to figure out who murdered him recently, after the meth was 're-sleeved' and lost 48 hours of memory since his last stack backup.

The writing is impressive. I loved this novel from very early on, purely based on the Chandler-esque descriptions. Here's a few examples, I've never so vividly imagined a nose breaking before.

Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency sine curves beneath the single sheet.

...it's like trying to throw a net over smoke.

My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery, and blood flooded down over my mouth

But its not just the writing that makes this a great novel: you have a gritty detective, hard-boiled humour, a fascinating almost-dystopian world chock-full of amazing technology, and a cast of misfit characters. Most of whom constantly teeter on the brink of 'good' or 'bad'.

Kovacs pursues a line of investigation for quite some time, only to have it abruptly dead-end, requiring him to throw away most of his assumptions and cast around for a new investigative thread to pull. I found this section of the novel jarring and disheartening, but I think this was actually quite clever writing: detective work must often face obstacles like this, and I was empathising with Takeshi who was experiencing the same emotions. I think Morgan's solution to this problem, and a number of others, was use of the 'screw a woman who will then give you a vital clue' plot device, which tended to be a little heavy handed since Takeshi gets almost all his leads this way.

I'll leave you with a few random observations.

Kovacs' tour of PsychaSec on Alcatraz reminded me of just about every data-centre tour I've ever been on:

We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the seven to eleven degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at the racks of the big thirty-centimeter expanded-format disks, and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. "It's a duplex system", Nyman said proudly....I made polite noises.

Reileen (Ray) Kawahara's HQ is a ridiculous bond villian lair, it might as well have been inside a volcano:

I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross, and whose ceiling was lost in the gloom above us...I saw that the roof here was vaulted with the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords...

Overall, great book, highly recommend, unless you don't like violence, sex, or Catholic bashing:

Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They've been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They've been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won't even let their adherents practice birth control, and they've stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries.

5 stars