Altered Carbon (Gollancz S.F.) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Altered Carbon (Gollancz S.F.) Book

Richard Morgan's debut SF thriller Altered Carbon isn't for the faint-hearted. Its noir private-eye investigation races through extreme violence, hideously imaginative torture and many high-tech firefights. In 2411, death is not forever. Afterward, they can read your personality from an implanted "cortical stack" and upload you into a new body--at a price. Hero Kovacs has worn many bodies on different worlds as a former member of the UN Envoy Corps, programmed killers to a man. Now the incredibly rich Bancroft brings him to Earth to investigate a killing... of Bancroft himself, restored from his digital backup and rejecting the police theory of suicide. Half the vice-lords of 25th-century San Francisco are soon chasing Kovacs with futuristic surveillance, drugs and weaponry. Virtual-reality interrogation means they can torture you to death, and then start again. There's a bleak slave trade in rented or confiscated bodies--and Kovacs finds his current borrowed face is all too well known to both police and underworld. Ultraviolent set-pieces follow, sprinkled with philosophical asides such as this reflection on a stungun: "It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped around me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death." There are some James-Bondian implausibilities, such as Kovacs's final confrontation with the villain he's sworn to kill: rather than shooting and leaving fast, he discusses the plot for 10 pages until... but that would be telling. This is high-tension SF action, hard to put down--though squeamish readers may shut their eyes rather frequently. --David LangfordRead More

from£6.46 | RRP: £7.99
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £3.29
  • Amazon

    An amazingly confident, action-and-violence packed thriller, and future classic noir SF novel.

  • Foyles

    Now a major Netflix series, dive into the wild future that is Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon.   Winner Philip K. Dick Award Best Novel 2003 It is several hundred years hence. The digital upload of our consciousness to new waiting bodies – ‘sleeves’ – has become commonplace; for those wealthy enough to be able to afford regularly updated sleeves, life is effectively a state of immortality. Laurens Bancroft is wealthier than most and he has a murder to solve - his own. Somewhere between the regular backups of his entire personality to an orbiting remote storage, someone has seen fit to stage his suicide, an attempted hack on his backup an effort to be rid of him for good. With no memory of what has happened, he needs someone good – very good – to track down his murderer before they strike again. Takeshi Kovacs is a disgraced ex-Envoy, a super-soldier of the future designed for the extraordinary rigours of faster-than-light travel. Trained to overcome the psychological traumas of rapid re-sleeving to distant download centres across the galaxy, Kovacs finds his troubled digital consciousness pulled out of storage and into Bancroft’s bargain: his life returned, his sentence quashed, if he solves the mystery of the mogul’s apparent murder. In what was Richard K. Morgan’s debut novel, Altered Carbon is a high-octane fusion of cyberpunk chic and hard-boiled noir as we follow Kovacs into an outlandish future vision dominated by the very edge of speculative technology. Perfectly fusing William Gibson and Mickey Spillane, conspiracy, mayhem and imaginative verve all combine to form one of the most exiting novels to emerge from British science fiction in decades. The Takeshi Kovacs novels continue with Broken Angels and Woken Furies. Aside from SF, Morgan has also delved into fantasy with his acclaimed A Land Fit for Heroes series (beginning with The Steel Remains). Morgan has also written for Marvel Comics and the video games Crysis 2 and Syndicate.

  • TheBookPeople

    Coming to Netflix in 2017, this must-read story is a confident, action-and-violence packed thriller, and future classic noir SF novel from a multi-award-winning author. Four hundred years from now mankind is strung out across a region of interstellar space inherited from an ancient civilization discovered on Mars. The colonies are linked together by the occasional sublight colony ship voyages and hyperspatial data-casting. Human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies as a matter of course. But some things never change. So when ex-envoy, now-convict Takeshi Kovacs has his consciousness and skills downloaded into the body of a nicotine-addicted ex-thug and presented with a catch-22 offer, he really shouldn't be surprised. Contracted by a billionaire to discover who murdered his last body, Kovacs is drawn into a terrifying conspiracy that stretches across known space and to the very top of society. For a first-time SF writer to be so surely in command of narrative and technology, so brilliant at world-building, so able to write such readable and enjoyable SF adventure, is simply extraordinary.

  • BookDepository

    Altered Carbon : Paperback : Orion Publishing Co : 9780575081246 : : 04 Sep 2008 : Now a MAJOR NEW NETFLIX SERIES, this must-read story is a confident, action-and-violence packed thriller, and future classic noir SF novel from a multi-award-winning author.

  • ASDA

    An amazingly confident action-and-violence packed thriller and future classic noir SF novel.

  • 0575081244
  • 9780575081246
  • Richard Morgan
  • 4 September 2008
  • Gollancz
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 480
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.