by Rajan Khanna

I first picked up Altered Carbon based on a recommendation by Jeff VanderMeer. It was billed as a noir/cyberpunk blend, a thriller that was already optioned by Hollywood. It took me a while to get around to reading it (as it often does), but once I finally did, I was hooked. I was commuting at the time and I remember being hugely disappointed having to put the book down to get off the train. I devoured it, and yet I had to sometimes force myself to slow down because I wanted it to last longer.

It was an extremely easy read, but not at all because it was simple or shallow fluff. Morgan opens up with a tantalizing taste of the world of Takeshi Kovacs, a brief exposure to this damaged man, and then you are swept along in a thrilling and complex story, all the while navigating the hairpin turns and jagged edges of the future world that Morgan has created.

It is a world of spacecraft, of planetary colonization and biomodification, and yet it is a world that's still familiar to the reader, one that is firmly planted in the street level grime and corruption of our present world.

The central technology at the heart of the Kovacs novels is the sleeving technology which encodes the personality on a digital level, allowing one's very essence to be downloaded into a body or sleeve. Death, true death at least, is rare for most because the cortical stack containing that person's data is usually recovered and the individual downloaded into a new sleeve. This creates a rather distinct separation between the mind and body, with bodies becoming interchangeable parts that one does not get too attached to.

Dwelling in this world of mix and match parts is Takeshi Kovacs, a former Envoy, a type of diplomatic supersoldier trained in skills both social and martial. Kovacs is a damaged man, and while his physical scars disappear with every new sleeve, the mental scars remain. He is a classic antihero, uncomfortable with authority, violent, brutal and sadistic while also remaining passionate, compassionate, and not without a sense of honor, and his own moral view of the world.

In Altered Carbon, Kovacs first appearance, Takeshi is sleeved into another man's body, his task to unravel the apparent suicide of one of San Francisco's wealthy elite, hired by the man who committed suicide himself. Kovacs must play the part of detective, all the while evading the attempts of people who don't want him to know the truth, facing threats connected to his past, navigating a seedy sexual world. It's a mystery, a thriller, part cyberpunk, part noir, part sci-fi and completely absorbing.

In Kovacs' second outing, Broken Angels, the action takes place offworld, on Sanction IV, a world torn by war. Kovacs is acting the part of mercenary now until a unique offer comes his way and he has to decide whether or not to take it. Unlike Altered Carbon, Broken Angels is a switch in gears from the environment to the tone and mood of the book. Takeshi is still front and center, but there is more of an ensemble cast and rather than a mystery this one draws more from science fiction/horror hybrids. Still there, though is the irrepressible personality of Kovacs and the bureaucratic corruption that is a common thread to these books.

In the third and final (for now) Kovacs novel (see Morgan's own announcement in our recent interview), Morgan returns Takeshi to his homeworld bringing the story full circle and bringing dangling plot threads to bear in whip-like fashion.

You might think that a world where death is so impermanent that it would rob the story of some sense of threat or danger, but such is not the case. Death still hurts and still wields tremendous power over the mind (as witnessed beautifully in Broken Angels). And since death is something that is usually repairable, true death, the death of one's digital information, seems all the more final.

Of course the sleeving technology brings up all kinds of other ramifications. Are bodies mere vehicles for our personalities that can be changed as often as one changes cars? Or is there something of the body itself that can bring itself to bear on the mind? Morgan touches on this in the first novel.

Then there are numerous other technological achievements to speak of, some based around this idea of sleeves. If bodies are mere shells or vehicles, why not customize them for function? In Kovacs' world, bodies are grown, tailored to specific tasks. Military sleeves contain state of the art neurachem, enhanced nervous systems with precise control over muscle response and reflexes. Some have bioplates, actual hardware inside the body that interfaces with weapons. Bodies can be built to order, especially in the world that Kovacs inhabits, a world of violence and black ops.

And these bodies don't just come in black and white. One of the great things about the Kovacs novels are how multicultural they are. Extrapolating from our present day, Kovacs' world is filled with Maori combat sleeves and every culture and color that you could think of. Takeshi Kovacs himself is part Japanese, part Eastern European. This is nothing new in science fiction, this multicultural future, but Morgan makes it seem natural, and divorces it from one's cultural identity. How can you be connected to a particular skin color when one day you can have white skin, and the next it's black.

There are more technological innovations, of course. Sometimes Morgan mentions things in throwaway lines that might deserve chapters if not their own books. Some might find this frustrating, but for me it creates this integrated sense of a larger world. As a reader you feel that there, on the periphery, is a huge, panoramic world. You're just too focused on the path in front of you (Kovacs' path), and delightfully helpless to stop and take a look around.

But all is not technological innovation. Kovacs' future is a bleak one, with the same divides of wealth and status, the same overbearing authority, the same threat (perhaps increased) of war. Despite the advancements that technology has given them, the same ills of the modern world have been intensified. Corporations run rampant, grinding up the common man in their endlessly revolving gears. Politicians make decisions, swayed by money and influence, that wreck innocent lives. Wars are decided in a boardrooms far away from the dying men and women enlisted to fight them. Where people should soar, lifted up by advancements in medicine and technology, they instead are crushed under the oppressive weight of ideology, corruption, and greed.

Is it any wonder, then, that we side with the antihero, the violent, sadistic bastard who steps up and looks these people in the eye before kicking them in the balls? Is it any wonder that we cheer as the rogue Envoy takes on anyone in his way as he tries for the big score? Hell no. We applaud him, and his violent ways, as our proxy in this bleak and morally barren world. He is our champion, the only kind such a world can support. Won't you give him your favor?

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