cheddar
16th March 2008, 09:41 PM
I just finished reading Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. I had heard a lot of people mention this book, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Given that I’m a huge science fiction fan, I figured that it would make for a great read.
Wow. What a huge disappointment.
If I had just picked this book up off the shelf and read it without hearing so much hype first, I probably would have enjoyed it somewhat. Instead, I spent the last 150 pages or so asking myself what the heck so many other people saw in it. One positive outcome of reading this book, though, was that it made me realize that the cyberpunk genre isn’t to my personal tastes, and that I should probably stop reading these sorts of books (I’ve read two others: Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and while I mildly enjoyed some aspects of Neuromancer, overall the two books left me extremely underwhelmed).
Without going into the plot, I had a lot of problems with Altered Carbon. One is that throughout the whole book, the author constantly tells the reader how awesome and tough and amazing and competent the main character is: he’s a super-soldier, he’s had all sorts of turbo-conditioning in combat and observation and self-control, he can kick anybody’s *** without blinking. He’s hardcore, he’s tough-as-nails. Don’t even think about messing with this guy, because if you do, he can kill you five times before you hit the ground.
But despite all of this hype, he spend the entire book doing silly and downright incompetent things. He lets information slip in conversations that he didn’t want other people to know. He lets anger and lust cloud his judgment, and as a result does reckless things. At one point he just plain forgets something that someone told him, point-blank, clear as day, a few chapters ago, something that compromised his plans in a somewhat serious way. (And then he acted all surprised after it happened, like “Wow, that was totally out of left field!”) For as many pages as the authors talks about his uber-conditioning, he sure behaves like a flake and a dolt a lot, much more like your average Joe than an amazing super-soldier.
Another problem is that I thought that the author engaged in far too many cliches with the plot and the characterizations, and even some of the dialog. I won’t go into specific examples in order to avoid any potential spoilers for others who have yet to read it, but I’m referring to the type of cliches that pop up in bad action movies from the 80s. There was one sex scene where I could almost hear the cheesy wailing of an alto sax in the background, as heard in so many awful Steven Seagal movies where he gets into a heated argument with some bimbo then hops into the sack with her fifteen seconds later. I actually rolled my eyes and said out loud, “This is stupid,” when I got to that part and realized that the author was, in fact, going that route rather than doing something interesting or unexpected with the scene.
My third problem with the book is that the author went through the trouble of coming up with an imaginative world filled with a lot of great concepts, but then for the plot decided to ignore any number of truly original ideas and instead just wrote a fairly bland film noir detective story. When I got to the section of the story fairly early on where the basic plot was laid out, my reaction was, “Um…okay. So this is just a basic detective story? Well, he must do something cool with it later, give the world that he’s set up.” Nope. The further I read, the less interesting the story became. The cool concepts that made up the world seemed to get pushed further and further into the background rather than merging with the detective story to create something fresh. With only 150 pages left, I ended up speed reading just to get to the end (I almost gave up on in completely rather than finish, then decided to do so anyway since I’d already sunk so much time into it), and when I read the big climax and resolution, my ultimate reaction was a resounding, “Meh.” There weren’t any twists or surprises to redeem the fairly mundane plot.
Overall, I think that a lot of my main problems with this book lie in the fact that I just don’t care for the cyberpunk genre very much. So many of the common themes in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Altered Carbon came across to me as a thirteen-year-old anime fan’s wet dream. “OMG THIS IS SO WICKED COOL HACKERS AND DRUGS AND WISE-CRACKING COMPUTERS AND EXTREME NINJA SAMURAI KICKBOXING WARRIORS OMGWTFBBQ!!!!111!!!”
As I said earlier, I love science fiction. It’s my favorite genre. But so many things in these three books just felt silly to me. I imagine that this genre felt much fresher and more original back when it first arose, but now, (especially after the popularity of one of my favorite movies, the Matrix, and the way that it’s been ripped off and regurgitated in so many forms since it first came out) it just feels kind of stale. Which is admittedly sad, given that the Matrix borrowed so heavily from earlier works like Neuromancer, and therefore (it can be argued) ripped them off.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. If I had known that this book was so similar to Neuromancer and Snow Crash, I probably would have skipped it, or at least not gotten suckered in by the hype as much as I did. Oh well. At least I didn’t spend any money on it--it goes back to the library tomorrow.
Wow. What a huge disappointment.
If I had just picked this book up off the shelf and read it without hearing so much hype first, I probably would have enjoyed it somewhat. Instead, I spent the last 150 pages or so asking myself what the heck so many other people saw in it. One positive outcome of reading this book, though, was that it made me realize that the cyberpunk genre isn’t to my personal tastes, and that I should probably stop reading these sorts of books (I’ve read two others: Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and while I mildly enjoyed some aspects of Neuromancer, overall the two books left me extremely underwhelmed).
Without going into the plot, I had a lot of problems with Altered Carbon. One is that throughout the whole book, the author constantly tells the reader how awesome and tough and amazing and competent the main character is: he’s a super-soldier, he’s had all sorts of turbo-conditioning in combat and observation and self-control, he can kick anybody’s *** without blinking. He’s hardcore, he’s tough-as-nails. Don’t even think about messing with this guy, because if you do, he can kill you five times before you hit the ground.
But despite all of this hype, he spend the entire book doing silly and downright incompetent things. He lets information slip in conversations that he didn’t want other people to know. He lets anger and lust cloud his judgment, and as a result does reckless things. At one point he just plain forgets something that someone told him, point-blank, clear as day, a few chapters ago, something that compromised his plans in a somewhat serious way. (And then he acted all surprised after it happened, like “Wow, that was totally out of left field!”) For as many pages as the authors talks about his uber-conditioning, he sure behaves like a flake and a dolt a lot, much more like your average Joe than an amazing super-soldier.
Another problem is that I thought that the author engaged in far too many cliches with the plot and the characterizations, and even some of the dialog. I won’t go into specific examples in order to avoid any potential spoilers for others who have yet to read it, but I’m referring to the type of cliches that pop up in bad action movies from the 80s. There was one sex scene where I could almost hear the cheesy wailing of an alto sax in the background, as heard in so many awful Steven Seagal movies where he gets into a heated argument with some bimbo then hops into the sack with her fifteen seconds later. I actually rolled my eyes and said out loud, “This is stupid,” when I got to that part and realized that the author was, in fact, going that route rather than doing something interesting or unexpected with the scene.
My third problem with the book is that the author went through the trouble of coming up with an imaginative world filled with a lot of great concepts, but then for the plot decided to ignore any number of truly original ideas and instead just wrote a fairly bland film noir detective story. When I got to the section of the story fairly early on where the basic plot was laid out, my reaction was, “Um…okay. So this is just a basic detective story? Well, he must do something cool with it later, give the world that he’s set up.” Nope. The further I read, the less interesting the story became. The cool concepts that made up the world seemed to get pushed further and further into the background rather than merging with the detective story to create something fresh. With only 150 pages left, I ended up speed reading just to get to the end (I almost gave up on in completely rather than finish, then decided to do so anyway since I’d already sunk so much time into it), and when I read the big climax and resolution, my ultimate reaction was a resounding, “Meh.” There weren’t any twists or surprises to redeem the fairly mundane plot.
Overall, I think that a lot of my main problems with this book lie in the fact that I just don’t care for the cyberpunk genre very much. So many of the common themes in Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Altered Carbon came across to me as a thirteen-year-old anime fan’s wet dream. “OMG THIS IS SO WICKED COOL HACKERS AND DRUGS AND WISE-CRACKING COMPUTERS AND EXTREME NINJA SAMURAI KICKBOXING WARRIORS OMGWTFBBQ!!!!111!!!”
As I said earlier, I love science fiction. It’s my favorite genre. But so many things in these three books just felt silly to me. I imagine that this genre felt much fresher and more original back when it first arose, but now, (especially after the popularity of one of my favorite movies, the Matrix, and the way that it’s been ripped off and regurgitated in so many forms since it first came out) it just feels kind of stale. Which is admittedly sad, given that the Matrix borrowed so heavily from earlier works like Neuromancer, and therefore (it can be argued) ripped them off.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. If I had known that this book was so similar to Neuromancer and Snow Crash, I probably would have skipped it, or at least not gotten suckered in by the hype as much as I did. Oh well. At least I didn’t spend any money on it--it goes back to the library tomorrow.