Peter Drummond 's Reviews > Altered Carbon

It's weird for me disliking a story so full of things I enjoy. Morgan goes out of his way to tackle compelling notions about life and morality at the intersection of technology. He asks about the nature of what makes us human. He challenges the idea that memory and experience solely define us. The pages are practically bursting with genre favorites like Cyborgs, gun-play, hovering vehicles, and bionically enhanced assassins. Assassins, who by the way, can be needle-cast from colonized world to colonized world in an instant. An army of souls sleeved in flesh they’ve never worn to keep the peace, using some sort of tactile telepathy to recognize whose side they're on.

That sounds cool as hell.

I want to know more about all of those grand notions, don't you? Then, why is the story itself set on earth? Earth is clearly a relic world, a shithole careening through space while humanity flourishes among the stars - I wanted to adore this book so much!

But, wishing it doesn’t make it so, this book still sucks!

Written in the first person, which is usually a turn off for me, Morgan is quick to exhibit exactly why I'm not a fan of this narrative style. From the unlikable inner longings of the main character to the sex scenes that are more awkward and uncomfortable than lurid. Imagine having your mother overshare the details of your conception while using the word c*nt - it's like that. If this unfortunate pressing of the flesh happened only once in the story, I might have been able to overlook it…

It didn’t, so neither will I.

Morgan jumps from profoundly cool concepts to silly tough guy posturing, but these scenes are equally poor in their execution. The main character is a stereotypical hard man, cussing and throwing his weight around, but it’s mostly caricature. Takeshi Kovachs comes off like a terrified High Schooler trying to be hardcore: content to simply fake it and hope no one takes notice, bullying his way from scene to scene with little more than the inertia of intent.

Passable for a private dick in our distant past, but really, really stupid, for an intergalactic god stompingly badass member of the Envoy Corps in the distant future.

There is a whole lot of intrigue in this book, and I still can’t put my finger on what it is all for. Everyone is reprehensibly dirty and beyond pity or affection; their sole purpose is to serve as set dressing to prop up interesting ideas that are not integral to the narrative. Characters run round and round while their supporting cast - who are way cooler and decidedly more kick-ass than Kovachs ever got the chance to be - drop like flies.

And, in case I have undersold my dislike, here, let me spell it out for you: This was a book that was as hard for me to get through as it was for me to like, and it had cyborgs!