Rating: 
Summary: Best fiction I've read all year
Review: Wow. Richard K. Morgan's "Altered Carbon" is probably the best fiction book I've read all year. It is incredibly imaginative, grittily gripping, solid and seamless. Morgan's prose is on par with that of any modern "literary" author and will satisfy serious readers.The book is cyberpunk, and so includes familiar existential mind-benders and a post-nation-state setting. But this is just the necessary backdrop, and not the focus of the book. Instead, the story is an Agatha Christie whodunit except with excellent character development. I loved this book because it is an intelligent page-turning thriller. But I also loved the clever devices Morgan employs. For example, the protagonist (his digitized mind) is broadcast to Earth and sleeved in the body of someone else who's mind is in prison. And although we never meet the person who's body the protagonist is wearing, he becomes a central character. It also raises great questions about how closely linked our physical beings are to who we really are. In another part of the book someone makes a copy of his digitized mind and so is able to have a conversation with himself. What would you ask yourself? Is it yourself? And if this doesn't convince you, the book is also packed with plenty of drugs, explosions, fights, [.....] and pimps, and surprisingly well-written erotic moments. Treat yourself to this noir sci-fi mystery; you won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: I can't wait for Kovacs's next appearance . . .
Review: Takeshi Kovacs, a native of Harlan's World and an ex-member of the thoroughly lethal UN Envoys, has inhabited many bodies in his career, both male and female, both natural and enhanced or even synthetic. That's the way life is lived in the 25th century. This ability to transfer personality and memories from one "sleeve" to another on demand also means it's seldom necessary to experience Real Death -- if you can afford it. It also means that the need for societal punishment usually results in having your cortical stack put on ice for a few decades, or even centuries -- and you might not get your own body back when you're released. Kovacs, though, is not typical, not even for an Envoy, and when he (or his consciousness) is needlecast across 180 light years to Earth by the excessively wealthy Laurens Bancroft to be offered a job investigating Bancroft's murder, he finds he can't refuse. The investigation gets him involved with all levels of Earth's society and with a wide variety of very artfully drawn characters, and he soon finds himself caught up in a vast conspiracy that he has very little chance of surviving. Woven through the story is Quellist philosophy ("Take it personally") and Kovacs's previous history and the ghosts that haunt him. This blend of noir detective thriller and uncommonly inventive cyberpunk is an astonishing piece of work for a first novel, and I expect Morgan to become well known in the sf community in a very short space of time.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but flawed
Review: As a fan of both hard boiled crime stories and cyberpunk scifi, this book sounded like it would be my ideal. Unfortunately, it mixes those genres but does not succeed in them. The book's biggest failure is the lack of common sense applied to the premise. In this world, any mind can be put in any body, and in fact the protagonist was born Japanese but inhabits a hispanic body throughout the book. This concept is throught provoking but I felt it was mishandled by Morgan. For instance, prison terms are served by putting a person's mind in storage while the body is given to someone else to use. Since the mind has no consciousness, this amounts to punishment by time travel. Also, characters constantly flip flop as to whether they associate their identity with their bodies or not. At one point someone will say "all bodies are the same" and at another he will lament not having his original body. This cognitive dissonance could have been an interesting concept to explore but it seem the book doesn't take the idea too seriously. The writing is also workmanlike. Morgan indulges himself is boring, cliched dream sequences throughout the book. His attempts to imitate the classic hard boiled allegories manage to seem out of place primarily because they occur too infrequently. That being said, the pacing is quite good and the book is a page turner. Thought the story was ultimately overblown, I did manage to care enough to finish the book. I think Morgan shows promise. For his next book, he could use a better editor to reel in some of his sillier ideas. But I will keep an eye on his work in the future.
Rating:
Summary: WOW....keep on writing Richard!!!
Review: this book thrilled me, and I read it right after I finished Broken Angels...which goes to show you that this guy is a great writer. his capture of the essence of the 25th C, plus the ever-misty details of the Martians leads me to believe that he knows his craft!!! keep writing Richard...I'm awaiting #3 with great glee!!!
Jim
Rating:
Summary: Gibson Meets Chandler/Hammett
Review: Outstanding book if you like your cyberpunk sprinkled with liberal doses of 1930s L.A. detective fiction noir. Some other reviewers here have expressed that the novel is a knock off of better known works - while that may be partially true, it is more accurate to cite that sooner or later *all* cyberpunk tales diverge. For example, Gibson is held up as the original but the reality is that his 1984 claim to famer 'Neuromancer' was nothing but a turbo-boosted knockoff of Sam Delany's 'Dhalgren,' however, I digress.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much of a re-sleeve.
Review: For 'the-well-read-man' there is nothing new in this book, most of it being derived from Iain M Banks': Use of Weapons, Against a Dark Background, and Look to Windward; a smattering of William Gibson's: Neuromancer; and some of K. W. Jeter's work - probably Noir. A great deal of the book is concerned with scenes of gratuitous violence, containing just enough material to maintain a thread to the overall narrative. The plot is a basic Raymond Chandleresque romp, which serves to imbue the characters with some motivation... Richard Morgan's prose is unusually good for a British author, comparable to the better US writers such as K. W. Jeter, and devoid of the flowery and redundant elements that mars many of his contemporaries. It's unfortunate that the logical elements of this book aren't as well considered. The most obvious failing was Reileen Kawahara not figuring on the virus she supplied to Takeshi Kovacs being turned on herself, as it subsequently, and conveniently was. There was too little background to the history of the cortical-stack, robbing the story of useful technical details, which would have been more insightful than the Catholic church coming in for some stick - yet again. Another failing was any substantial insight as to why being un-sleeved for a length of judicial-time was of consequence, since the impression was given that unless you were being tortured / interrogated in virtual, you were more or less unconscious for the period. The only significant aspect to any punishment being that you would probably end up in someone else's body or a synthetic of dubious quality. Alternate Carbon is a reasonable book. But is too derivative for 2003. More effort could have been made to make it a more plausibly coherent and interesting read, at least, and with more interesting and convincing nomenclature and associated technology for the twenty-sixth century.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the money
Review: Not many first time authors turn out a novel this good. Great character development, fascinating science, gets right to the heart of the story without dancing around with superfluous page filler. The plot struggles a bit as the who-dunnit sorts itself out, but a good story anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Hey Ms Evil reviewer who falsely claims to be Taleweaver :
Review: Did we not learn about semicolons in school? You need one after escapades. You also need to work on your sentence structure. You are getting very close to having run on sentences in your "review." Though I have not read this particular novel yet, I might consider reading it. It must not be too bad. You gave it a low "review."
Rating: 
Summary: Succeeded in some areas, failed miserably in others.
Review: Morgan's novice novel has a lot of excellent ideas with the rockets from the seediest hellholes on Earth, through virtual reality torture, into several gory firefights, and on to some exotic sexual escapades, however, the writing doesn't have the maturity that you expect for this kind of money. Morgan succeeded with some of the essentials attempted, but others were full of potholes. It did become rather dull with some of the details, and needs to be more dedicated to the development of the overall story, then it would be an excellent work, but unfortunately, it doesn't have the maturity it should have.
Rating: 
Summary: Dull and unoriginal
Review: I thought this was really very average. A few elements from Strange Days mixed with Michael Marshall Smith's Spares. Nothing original here. Not even well witten.
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