Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan

[essentialsaltes]

Similar to Leviathan Wakes, the last book I read, Altered Carbon is a mash-up of noir detective and science fiction. This one is more cyberpunk flavored, which already has a strong noir background (a formula I followed in making my own Cyber/Cthulhu/noir mashup in Eldritch Chrome). Morgan gets a lot of the feel of traditional noir right, unfortunately including the increasingly convoluted plot that gets fake-resolved and then rescrambled more and more unconvincingly. There's also a slight overseasoning of gun-and-combat fetishization for my tastes. But on the whole good stuff -- good enough to win the PKD award, anyway. It'll be interesting to see what Netflix makes of it, since they've announced a 10 episode series.