I hate this book. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate the characters, I hate the plot, I hate the cover, I hate the way it smells, and I hate the way it knockI hate this book. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate the characters, I hate the plot, I hate the cover, I hate the way it smells, and I hate the way it knocked over a lamp when I frisbeed it across the room in a fit of literary angst. It came to me highly recommended by a number of friends, good friends, caring, kind, and well-read friends who share with me a love of speculative fiction. We all love Snow Crash and Neuromancer and Babylon 5, and we all hate football and direct sunlight. We are all science or engineering majors, and therefore we spent our socially-awkward, bespectacled childhoods sitting in the back of French class, surreptitiously reading The Lord of the Rings under our desks while Monsieur Charpentier tried to teach us the subjunctive mood. What I'm trying to say is that yes, I have a certain amount of nerd cred, and come from a background well-suited to an appreciation of cyberpunk. So when I heard about Altered Carbon, I didn’t hesitate to pick it up.
My main problem with this book can be summed up as everything.
Seriously, everything. Every single aspect of this book conspired together to instill in me a strange mixture of despair, anger, and boredom. To call the characters one-dimensional would be an insult to the number line. The plot is convoluted and nonsensical. The protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is an Envoy, a sort of highly-trained, elite interstellar soldier, and one of the most blitheringly stupid morons I’ve had the displeasure of reading about. New technologies are condensed out of thin air to arbitrarily move the plot along. Every character to whom the reader is supposed to be sympathetic is either an unlikable asshole, an idiot, or both.
Choose two: Incompetent, unlikable, cliché. Bam, you’ve described a character in Altered Carbon.
And then there’s the violence. Now, I thoroughly enjoyed The Repossession Mambo (renamed Repo Men after the movie came out), a book so blood-soaked that it’s practically a biohazard. Somehow, Morgan has managed to craft a work of prose so exquisitely brutish that it made me uncomfortable. That’s actually kind of impressive. Good job.
Morgan also seems to have a fascination with the word “enzyme.” It gets a little weird.
At the end of the day, I ended up putting this book down six-sevenths of the way through because I found out there was a sequel, dashing my hopes that Kovacs would permanently die in a horrible way on the last page. By around the halfway point, I was literally reading Altered Carbon out of pure spite. I hate this book, I hate Richard Morgan, and I hate you. Not because you deserve it -- you are probably a perfectly fine human being, or a reasonable facsimile thereof -- but because any time I think about Altered Carbon I am unable to experience any emotion but unending, bitter, sobbing hatred. I read (most of) Altered Carbon and came out the other side a changed man, and not for the better. Please, for the love of all that you hold dear, don’t read this book. And if you do, don’t tell me that you enjoyed it or I might just vomit all over you and/or punch you in the solar plexus before you have a chance to say “postmodern.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to hug a cat and watch a Pixar movie. If that doesn’t cheer me up, I’ll probably be forced to check out every copy of Altered Carbon from a library, light them on fire, throw the ashes into a river, and listen to Smile Empty Soul songs until I can’t feel emotions anymore. ...more
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