No one has been murdered for thousands of years, most human brains are actually machine intelligences and the big problem facing the hero is how to prevent a new universe created within our own from expanding to swallow all inhabited worlds. Apart from that, it couldn't be more different. Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan (Gollancz, £10.99) also uses backed-up memories, borrowed bodies and characters who have died dozens of times. For all its reliance on neural upgrades, implants, virtual reality and the other borrowed tropes of 1980s cyberpunk, Altered Carbon reads like a hypermodern vampire novel as its hero faces down an unholy alliance of the un(willing-to-be)dead. And it is one such recently dead, memory-impaired "Meth" who hires Kovacs to find out why he had committed suicide. Methuselah-like, obviously: long-lived and tied tightly in webs of self-interest. Now that memories can be backed up and bodies swapped by anyone able to afford it, where does that leave the rich? Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-UN envoy (read killer) dragged out of storage following his most recent death to be needlecast across space, a plot device that lets him transfer from a distant star system to a fresh body in San Francisco. Bodies are discarded like last season's fashion accessories in Altered Carbon (Gollancz, £10.99), Richard Morgan's homage to old-school cyberpunk.
D eath: what is it good for? Not much, if these three novels are anything to go by.
0 kommentar(er)
