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A neighbor made me read this book by Richard K. Morgan, saying it’s the best sci-fi he’s ever read. I only wish I could agree.
The book takes place some 500 years in the future, by which time we have gone into space and settled a whole bunch of other planets and figured out how to transplant a person’s consciousness into another body. When a person has their consciousness transferred to another body, the body is called a “sleeve.” Of course not everyone can afford to get “resleeved” if something happens to them, but for those who can, they have the option of using a synthetic sleeve or the body of someone whose consciousness is “in storage” (which is basically the 26th century version of jail). The elite can afford to have themselves cloned and slip into a new body whenever one wears out.
I’m glad Morgan didn’t just say, “We figured out how to transplant consciousness and now no one ever really dies!” Money is always a huge factor and he takes it into account, as well as the fact that being in a new body is seriously weird and requires a lot of adjustment.
The plot is a mystery/thriller. The main character, Takeshi Kovacs is a former Envoy, which is kind of like the marines. They’re super soldiers with deadly training and the psychological profile and manipulation to go along with it. Kovacs had decided he was done with the military and run off with his girlfriend, but they were tracked down, killed, and put in storage.
Kovacs was taken out of storage and put into a sleeve in San Francisco because a wealthy guy named Bancroft needs Kovacs to solve his murder for him. Of course, being super wealthy, Bancroft was almost immediately resleeved into a clone and is going about his business, so it’s not like there was any permanent damage done. It’s more that he’s insulted by the fact that anyone would dare to attack him in his own home.
He was killed with his own gun which was kept in a safe only he and his wife had access to and she passed a polygraph test saying she didn’t do it. The police have ruled it a suicide and moved on. That’s not good enough for Bancroft, but I can’t blame the cops on this one. They have to deal with real crimes committed against people who can’t get resleeved for a variety of reasons. The personal vendetta of a super wealthy 300+-year-old dude doesn’t exactly rank highly on their priority lists and I totally get that.
So Kovacs is trying to figure out what went down and in the course of it all he discovers corporate and political intrigues along with both low-level and high-level whores, a framed cop, and confused feelings as a result of being in another person’s sleeve. It’s all very complicated, but masterfully handled and very well written. There are some very interesting discussions about the struggles of living in another person’s body and what happens to a person’s conscience when they have the ability to live for centuries and watch other people live and die like the rest of us watch flies.
My problem was that I just didn’t care. Kovacs never gave me a reason to care about him or his girlfriend. He set out to get revenge on Kawahara, an ancient woman who has worked her way up the crime ladder over the centuries and now has her fingers in all sorts of pies and is pulling strings left and right. Kovacs sets out to take her down, although he’s aware it’ll be extremely difficult and dangerous. That mission had a lot of potential to be exciting if I had been given a reason to care. As it is, all we have is Kovacs’s word that Kawahara is a dangerous sociopath who has been responsible for countless lives and pissed off Kovacs one too many times, but we never get to see any of this. There are scenes with Kawahara, and yes it’s clear she’s manipulative and unscrupulous, but we don’t get to see her do anything that really would have made me root for Kovacs to take her down.
This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that, although he’s the narrator, Kovacs didn’t say or do anything to make me particularly care about him. He admits he’s been called a psychopath multiple times, and he doesn’t really deny the accusation, which gives me very little motivation to root for him.
I also tend to think this book was just too macho for me, which is not to say misogynistic, because it’s not. It’s just that it’s told from the point of view of this dude who was trained to kill and there is a whole lot of violence in this book. The main character goes on at least two carefully planned killing sprees and manages to take out whole buildings full of people all on his own. I’m OK with some violence in my fiction, but I felt this was excessive and that may have been one of the reasons I had a hard time getting into it.
What did you guys read this week? Any other recommendations that fell flat?