Altered Carbon (Kovacs)

thumbnail

List Price: £13.49 (GBP)
  • Lowest New Price: £10.65
  • Lowest Used Price: £13.48
  • Total New: 5
  • Total Used: 6
  • Total Collectible: 0
  • Total Refurbished: 0
  • Author : Richard K. Morgan
  • Binding : MP3 CD
  • Creator : Todd Parker McLaren
  • EAN : 9781400151370
  • Edition : Unabridged
  • Format : Audiobook
  • Format : MP3 Audio
  • Format : Unabridged
  • ISBN : 1400151376
  • Label : Tantor Media, Inc
  • Languages : Original Language: English, Published: English
  • Manufacturer : Tantor Media, Inc
  • Number Of Items : 2
  • Package Dimensions : 0.60 inches (Height) x 7.50 inches (Length) x 0.30 pounds (Weight) x 5.30 inches (Width)
  • Product Group : Book
  • Publication Date : 2005-01-10
  • Publisher : Tantor Media, Inc
  • SKU : ACOMMP2_book_usedgood_1400151376
  • Studio : Tantor Media, Inc

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 Langford

- Amazon.co.uk Review

Leave a Comment:

(required)

(will not be published) (required)

Copyright © 1999-2012 Data Growth Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Use |