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

Old Man's War by John Scalzi (4.5 stars)

There's a great premise here: at 75, people living on Earth can optionally enlist in the Colonial Defence Force, get some advanced medical treatment, and hop on a one-way flight into space to defend far-flung human colonies. Sclazi writes a ripping military Sci-Fi space opera, with significant influence from Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but with less moral, political, and thematic depth and more fast-paced action. That may be good or bad depending on your point of view.

That's not to say the characters are shallow, Perry is well-rounded, intelligent, and desperately misses his wife, who dies a number of years before he joins the CDF.

For as much as I hate the cemetary, I've been grateful it's here, too. I miss my wife. It's easier to miss her at a cemetary, where she's never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.

The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another - it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.

The medical treatment, it's outcomes, and the old people's reactions to their new fitness was fascinating reading. The BrianPals felt a lot like Google Glass plus 20 years.

I hated the section with Master Sergeant Ruiz as the cliched drill instructor. Scalzi acknowledged that he was writing a cliche drill instructor and tries to address it head on:

"You're under the impression that I'm talking like this because this is just something drill instructors are supposed to do. You're under the impression that after a few weeks of training, my gruff but fair facade will begin to slip and I will show some inkling of being impressed with the lot of you, and that at the end of your training, you'll have earned my grudging respect...You're impression, ladies and gentlemen, is completely and irrevocably fucked."

But the scenario described is exactly what happens.

Battles are had, aliens and humans die in creative ways, and it's all very entertaining (the Consu reminded me of Dr. Who's Sontarans in their war-like temperament). However, the human-led massacre of Lilliputian aliens is ridiculous (stomping? really? even today's weapons could easily destroy a tiny city more efficiently) and a bizarre way to introduce Perry's moral conflict.

All that aside, it is a great thriller which is impossible to put down. That's so rare I'm willing to forgive much.

4.5 stars