Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Rating: 3.5 of 5

Altered Carbon is a porn/mystery detective novel dressed up as Science Fiction.

I did enjoy reading Altered Carbon and I feel bad giving it a 3.5/5 star rating but I couldn’t give it a 4/5 because

• Sometimes the story is a little hard to follow. This maybe my fault as I read the book mostly late at night. But as a detective/mystery novel its purposefully convoluted. I think the author could have made this a little easier and not given away the mystery
• The hole “download your conciousness” idea at times felt a little contrived. I think its an interesting idea but philosophically I don’t think it works. I’m not convinced my conciousness can be separate from my body. This was a pretty big blocker for me.
• To me the separation between physical reality and virtual reality seemed contrived. Why don’t people live virtually more often? Why is it so easy to detect you’re in a virtual simulation? What’s the point of physical experience when I can just have it virtually? I felt like the author just didn’t want to deal with these things because he wanted to write a detective novel. To me this felt like opportunity lost.
• It was never explained why “being in storage” was punishment. What’s the drawbacks of “being in storage”? Why is the experience painful? I have guesses, but these people are living in a different universe, it would be good to explain this.

So most of my issues with the book have to do with the universe. Overall the crime/detective portion of the story was pretty engaging. I was curious to see the various twists and overall the author did a good job of delivering these.

I had some mixed feelings about the relationship between Takeshi and the various women in the story. It was a bit of a uber male story and he slept with pretty much every attractive woman in the book. While I found this a bit too much hetro-male fantasy trash literature. I’m forced to admit that Richard Morgan writes a surprisingly good sex scene. As a piece of hardcore porn Altered Carbon does surprisingly well. I don’t usually enjoy reading sex in novels, but this time… well… let’s just say I’m open minded to just skipping to and reading a few sections again :blush:.

I recommend Altered Carbon to readers who enjoy this style of book and don’t regret reading it, But other readers should be warned. Its not really SciFi, its fantasy with a bit of porn and mystery mixed in. Do not expect a “high brow” read, but not every book needs to be Pride and Prejudice to be a “good” book.