The Grok

Author: Richard Morgan

Altered Carbon is a futuristic cyberpunk novel. As the story starts off, Takeshi Kovacs, the protagonist of the book, dies in a shoot out in the first few pages of the book. But, this is the future and humanity has managed to cross the boundary of mortality by making use of 'resleeving' technology. Resleeving is the process of downloading a person's brain into another body/sleeve. The catch is that a certain amount of memory is lost as an older backup which lags by a few days has to be used to reconstruct the individual.

Kovacs is resleeved and finds out that he has been hired to investigate an attempted suicide attempt by an affluent Earth citizen, Laurens Bancroft. Laurens does not believe that he would have committed suicide and assigns Kovacs the job of finding the real killer. If you are wondering why someone who has been killed would be hiring an investigator, you probably missed the resleeving idea.

Once the story is set up, the book takes on a normal cyberpunk noir feel, often crossing into hard boiled detective story territory. The scenes are well described to give the reader a good sense of the environment. The characters are also well developed.

Besides the resleeving idea, I didn't find any other plot element fascinating. The book moves at a slow pace and parts of the story were totally unnecessary. I am guessing this will be yet another cyberpunk novel that I haven't liked, which probably means I don't enjoy this genre. If you liked Neuromancer, this might just be the next best thing you can get your hands on.

There is also a background story about Kovacs past in the Envoy Corps which comes up frequently. I couldn't care less about this, which contributed further to my lack of interest in the book. If you do find yourself liking the book, then you could go on and read the sequel.

Personally, this was yet another failed attempt at reading a cyberpunk novel. If you find the hard boiled detective genre coupled with cyberpunk enjoyable, then you might want to pick it up. If you are interested in fast paced action with strong plots, then don't bother with this book.

Rating: 2.0 / 5.0