Review: Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Takeshi Kovacs lives in a future where your person could be downloaded, granting you life upon life if you can record re-sleevings; download your body into a new body or a clone of your original. Kovacs is a grasshopper, an outworlder, charged with investigating a suicide down on Earth that the body's owner insists is not a suicide but a murder. The body's owner is a Meth, a powerful man so rich he has been able to live for centuries.

Suicide or murder? Kovac's research lets us explore the future Earth and what used to be San Fransisco with surroundings. I really love when authors let the character talk and interact with the world like it's their usual habitat, throwing pop culture remarks and thoughts on society like that is the reader's reality as well. The book doesn't overexploit, but let the book's world be, though Kovac's not being born on Earth let us know about important or interesting stuff about Earth through Kovac's cluelessness.

I thought the characters felt realistic with their thoughts and actions and I liked the realness of the relationships. There were a couple of sex scenes I thought were uninteresting and useless, but the mystery and plots were grabbing enough and I enjoyed the book.

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