One of the great things about joining a reading community like The Cannonball Read is that I’ve really broadened my reading horizons. I’ve tried genres that I would never had read before, with a lot of positive results. Altered Carbon is a book that I never would have read before joining up with this group. Sure, I would have watched the Netflix show, but I wouldn’t have really cared about the source material, saying something like “that’s not really in my wheelhouse.” We were watching […]
I prefer the screen adaptation
When borrowing ebooks from your local library, always double check the publishing format before you set it on your hold list. Discovering Altered Carbon only came in EPUB and was therefore inaccessible on my Kindle was not fun. But that’s neither here nor there. In between the time when I put this on my hold list and the time I finally got it, I watched the full first season of the show on Netflix and I really enjoyed it! It’s definitely not one of their higher-tier […]
Not as enraptured the second time around
I want to say I was introduced to Altered Carbon around 2007. I do remember that by the time it came into my hands the entire trilogy was out so I was able to blitz through all three. At the time I loved it and couldn’t put the books down. When I heard that Netflix was doing an adaptation, I was pretty excited from the remembered enjoyment of reading it. Then a blog talked about the problems of any adaptation to the book. Namely that a guy […]
“Get to the next screen”
What does society look like if your consciousness can be saved to a device and installed into a new body making death theoretically impossible? While this sounds like the plot of an episode of Black Mirror, it’s actually the main conceit of Altered Carbon, published in 2006 (and adapted into a series on Netflix this year). At birth, every human has a cortical stack implanted at the base of the skull that contains their consciousness. Only the destruction of the stack results in what’s […]
“Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin.”
3.5 stars Altered Carbon is a technically great book that I liked, but didn’t completely click for me in a way that I expected it to. Its premise drew me in, and the stylistic excellence of Richard K. Morgan’s prose lends itself equally well to technobabble, gritty noir dialogue, and surrealism. He’s also created a compelling, hyper-competent lead character in Takeshi Kovacs, who plays up the strong and silent thing to great effect but also employs cutting, dark humor with aplomb. The idea is this: […]