I found Altered
Carbon last year in my favorite bookshop, translated and published
on its own. I really enjoyed it, even more so as a cyberpunk
fan. It took me another year to find electronic versions of
other books in Takeshi Kovacs trilogy; Broken Angels
and Woken
Furies, which I read this winter in a period of a few days, or
nights to be more accurate. I started by re-reading Altered
Carbon which, for me, in the end turned out better then the second
book but not from Woken Furies which was a good
finale.
Setting is some 500 years in the future, at which point humans
colonized other planets. Dominant, and most interesting, concept in
these books is that people don't really die anymore, as most of them
have stacks in their spinal columns which store their personalities
and memories. If a body dies the stack can be uploaded to a
new sleeve (body). Well, there is still what they call
real death, destroying the stack (and all backups of it, if
any). That's where our hero, an ex envoy (elite military
unit), Takeshi Kovacs comes in. He is re-sleeved on Earth and
has to solve a murder case. Second book takes place some 30 years
later, where Kovacs is involved in a war on some distant planet... a
classic SciFi novel with interstellar warfare and
aliens. While in the third book he finally returns to his home
planet for a conclusion of a series. We also get to learn a lot
about his early days.
I don't read a lot of SF, apart from cyberpunk novels, but this was
really something. It's a mix of hard-boiled noir detective stories,
cyberpunk and contemporary SF. Something in it for
everyone. Richard
Morgan is an author I can depend on now to tell a really good
story, and his later
work The Black
Man (unrelated to Kovacs novels) confirms it.