Christine D. (christylisty) - , reviewed on 7/30/2017 + 45 more book reviews

Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon" is a action-powered trip into a future world where warrior Takeshi Kovacs's identity is pulled from one world into another and "sleeved" into a body with a history. His mission is to save himself and his girlfriend by figuring out why a man of power, who has body replacements, had one of his bodies murdered. Morgan takes the reader into a world of novel and brilliant futuristic concepts. His world is like being in a foreign country, one that leaves it to the reader to figure out over time what the technologies and terminologies he employs actually mean. Reading the book is like walking into a country with no understanding of its culture and language. It takes time to ultimately build a mental picture of what is happening in this book. Perhaps this was the author's purpose. I cannot tell. However, my singular criticism of this book is the author's writing style -- one that relies on short choppy sentences and minimal punctuation. It's almost as if his editor said the book was too long and he resolved the problem by the wholesale removal of words and punctuation. That said, the book did win the Philip K. Dick Award and was widely lauded. I think a great deal of praise has to go to the author's ability to imagine a world that captures fragments of today and whirls worth such a vivid tomorrow 300 years into the future.

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