I picked up Altered Carbon with the expectation of reading another Neuromancer or Snow Crash but felt somehow a bit blasé while reading it, as i did when i read The Demolished Man. Perhaps William Gibson is right and the future has become such an integral part of our present that there is little left to explore in terms of near-future Sci-Fi or Cyberpunk. Actually, no, I don’t agree with Gibson and I believe that there are still plenty of opportunities for Sci-Fi writers to mesmerize us with speculations about the future of the human race.

Altered Carbon is a Cyber-Noir that takes place 500 years from now. Takeshi Kovacs is a reluctant private eye, a mercenerary of sorts who gets downloaded left and right to do the types of jobs that others can not do.  In this case, he is downloaded in somone else’s body in San Francisco, and is hired by a rich man who wants Kovacs to investigate why this man has no recollection of his own recent suicide, and why he would have done such a thing in the first place.

A few planets have been colonized, people wear neurachems (jacked up nervous systems), AIs hold various jobs in society such as running hotels, the rich have become more or less immortal thanks to the ability to upload themselves into new sleeves (bodies) as they see fit and much of the communication takes place virtually (as does torture and imprisonment when combined with mind uploading). But the rest is pretty much 20th century: people still need their coffee to get going, they lament their nicotine addiction, they shoot people with fairly old-fashion guns and society as a whole seems to function very much according to our values today. Which, in my opinion, makes Altered Carbon a bit of a disjointed experience.

Richard Morgan does a good job at bringing the noir element into Kovacs’ investigation, although there is a bit of a gratuitous penchant for sadism and hardcore violence. The plot is tightly weaved and so elaborate that it becomes slightly confusing at times. In the end, Altered Carbon is a solid novel, especially for a first novel, but there was not enough in it to keep me very interested. Since the rights to the book have been bought by Hollywood, i can imagine very well this being turned into a near-future noir flick. It has all the right ingredients: the tough guy with a soft spot, the mysterious rich man who hires him, the two femmes fatales with their own agendas, the non-stop and sometimes convenient flow of scenes that allow our private eye to move forward with his investigation, lots of action and just the right amount of technological gimmicry to entertain the audience without breaking the budget. Unfortunately, i have a feeling it won’t be another Blade Runner.