He’s a stickler for principles, which is interesting in a soldier of fortune, highly trained killer and high-status U.N. He isn’t primarily interested in sex or money… there is something of the flag-waving warrior of righteousness about him. In the various sleeves into which he is decanted, he gets additional skills, strengths and chemical injections. His intriguing hero, “ Takeshi Kovacs”, a former soldier turned investigator, is, in his “natural” state, heroic, tough and highly intelligent. People’s brains and what’s in them are stored in a “stack” – a small storage device that sits below their skulls at the back of their heads. In Morgan’s vision of the future, people can swop bodies, called “sleeves”, to prevent themselves getting ill or dying, or enable them to live – theoretically – forever.
viii) What’s in a name? That which we call a sleeve by any other name would smell as…sweaty? He’s grinning, because he knows he’s never going to die.” (p. And Kovacs is alive with it – sitting here now, across the darkened room from me in that chair, with a drink in one hand and a heavy calibre weapon in the other. Morgan says in his Introduction to the novel: “The fiction of Altered Carbon is alive, in way I could not, twenty years ago, have imagined in my wildest authorial dreams.
Carbon serves as a common element of all known life. Human bodies are after all, 99% made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, and of that they are about 18.5% carbon. The title “Altered Carbon” and the subtitle “No Body lives Forever” are really clever and appropriate. Morgan had the foresight to develop an interesting premise that would not lose relevancy as the years went by and he continued to write more adventures for his central character, “Takeshi Kovacs”. Why am I only now reviewing Altered Carbon? Because self-isolation leads to a lot of hours of watching Netflix. This is why the television version of the novels has been so successful. Twenty years on it is still ingenious, due to the world changing, so that the issues and ideas at the core of the series that were relevant then, are still relevant now. The concept on which Altered Carbon is based is ingenious – it was futuristic and fantastical when Richard Morgan wrote the first book in the series way back in 2002. Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan (mass market paperback edition, published by Del Ray, 2006)
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