From the Bookshelf: Altered Carbon
Mar. 6th, 2018 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOn a "last chance sale" table at the bookstore, I saw a copy of a science fiction novel called Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan, marked down to two dollars. That was cheap enough to break through my usual exaggerated caution towards current science fiction. Once I'd bought the book, though, it did sit in a pile for a while before I decided, more or less all of a sudden, to start reading it. While I can't say this with certainty, I do believe that decision preceded my managing to see Netflix was streaming a series of that title, the capsule episode descriptions of which matched what I'd sorted out on starting to read the book (the vagueness of the back cover blurb and promotional quotes just might have slowed me down getting past them) as a story about a man named Takeshi Kovacs, shot in a futuristic gunfight in the prologue only to recover in a new body on another world with the order to solve the murder of an immensely wealthy man irritated at needing to have been restored from a backup.
If it hadn't already happened by the time I heard about the adaptation, though, I must have supposed pretty soon afterwards that it wouldn't have mattered whether the series was on Netflix or anywhere else in a certain amount of the book's violence-and-sex excess having to be toned down in the adaptation to a visual work. That excess could make for a fair bit of narrative drive, however, and the development of this particular future felt nicely metered out throughout. (There was a little bit of odd piquancy, however, in getting a general sense the book was British with an announcement coming over the "Tannoy" and Kovacs being stuffed into a car "boot," but all the action happening on the west coast of the future Earth's North America.) At a certain point I was getting through the book in small bits at a time, though, and that might have contributed to a sudden feeling of a new and significant antagonist popping up in my mind even as I supposed the proper introduction had already happened. I might have to read the book over again to really grasp that; some of the nastiness in it, though, might be leaving me reluctant to do that right now.
If it hadn't already happened by the time I heard about the adaptation, though, I must have supposed pretty soon afterwards that it wouldn't have mattered whether the series was on Netflix or anywhere else in a certain amount of the book's violence-and-sex excess having to be toned down in the adaptation to a visual work. That excess could make for a fair bit of narrative drive, however, and the development of this particular future felt nicely metered out throughout. (There was a little bit of odd piquancy, however, in getting a general sense the book was British with an announcement coming over the "Tannoy" and Kovacs being stuffed into a car "boot," but all the action happening on the west coast of the future Earth's North America.) At a certain point I was getting through the book in small bits at a time, though, and that might have contributed to a sudden feeling of a new and significant antagonist popping up in my mind even as I supposed the proper introduction had already happened. I might have to read the book over again to really grasp that; some of the nastiness in it, though, might be leaving me reluctant to do that right now.