In his latest work, Mr. Morgan blew the doors off conventional, stayed fantasy fiction. And so it should be no surprise that his first novel possesses the same vein of wonderful discord which runs through all his work. Mr. Morgan has focused his prodigious talent upon a genre of fiction I'd never heard of before the Takeshi Kovacs books, a kind of 1930s detective story transported into a 26th century humanity dominated by corruption and chaos. Noir science fiction? That's the best label I can put to this thoroughly entertaining of mashed-up genres which will hopefully become as popular as the trendy but annoying Steampunk.
Takeshi Kovacs (pronounced Ko-vatch) has spent most of his life as an UN Envoy, a job which, in the future, has a lot less to do with diplomatic peacekeeping than it does with covert assassination. He and his comrades are dropped onto threatening worlds, pacifying them through whatever means necessary. Their only real injunction from their commanders? To not get caught. This is how humanity is governed in the 26th century, by a United Nations which has conquered Earth and spread out to the stars, imposing a kind of pseudo order upon human civilization. When Kovacs finds himself harmed by a mission that goes terribly wrong, he defects to become a freelance mercenary cloaked in his own disillusionment. And this is the Kovacs we meet in the first few, bloody pages of Altered Carbon.
Though Kovacs' civilization has not yet broken the barrier of faster-than-light travel, it has discovered a clever way around it, a kind of quantum broadcast which can transmit information between two distant points in space at unthinkable speeds. Needlecasts, as they are called, are what allow humanity to knit together in a cohesive society for it allows one to transfer their consciousness from one place to another, leaving one body at the point of transmission and entering another at the point of reception. Bodies are vat-grown for precisely this purpose, to allow human minds to move about the known worlds without enduring the pesky problem of years in storage as ships crawl between the stars. This notion of needlecasting, while not original to Mr. Morgan, is handled here with deftness, cleverness and thoughtfulness. Mr. Morgan doesn't shy away from the ethical implications of minds being flung about and into various bodies. We discover justhow such a technology can be used to be cruel and to commit crime. Mr. Morgan even throws in a forgotten religious cult, the Catholics, who protest Needlecasting as against the laws of God, but there's no room for religion in a universe dominated by obsessive self-interest.
After being collared by the authorities, Kovacs expects to serve a long sentence for his transgressions. But when he's surprisingly liberated and downloaded into a body on Earth, he soon realizes that he's the pawn in a rich man's game, one rich man in particular who wishes Kovacs to solve his own murder. But it's no mistake that Kovacs was picked to solve a case he wasn't trained to execute. He'll have to navigate waters he barely understands, relying on only the questionable aid of a San Francisco police officer assigned to liaise with him. There's no part of this story that lags or trips. And its occupation of such an unusual position inside science fiction grants it an exciting novelty. This is outstanding work, but it is most definitely not for the faint of heart. (5/5 Stars)
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