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Altered Carbon
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
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Publisher's summary
Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched 180 light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats "existence" as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.
Critic reviews
"This far-future hard-boiled detective story is a lovely virtual-reality romp." (Booklist)
"Fast-paced, densely textured, impressive....Morgan's 25th-century Earth is convincing, while the questions he poses about how much Self is tied to body chemistry and how the rich believe themselves above the law are especially timely." (Publishers Weekly)
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Story
The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in music history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, best-selling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.
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I'm a RUSH fan, but ...no..not this book
- By NBP on 07-15-17
By: John McFetridge - editor, and others
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The Eternity Fund
- By: Liz Monument
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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A futuristic noir thriller: When Jess Green is recruited by the Unit for her unusual abilities, she hopes that she’s finally found safe haven. Unfortunately, life in Department Thirteen (Crime Solutions) is anything but. A sinister brotherhood are stealing human organs, and Jess and her uncooperative handler are put on the case. Their quest takes them into the lair of a rich philanthropist and his beautiful, brilliant daughter who together run The Eternity Fund, anti-ageing as it’s never been known before.
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Very interesting futuristic dystopian story.
- By JC. Sanders on 02-26-15
By: Liz Monument
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The Electric Church
- By: Jeff Somers
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Avery Cates is a very bad man. Some might call him a criminal. He might even be a killer - for the right price. But right now, Avery Cates is scared. He's up against the Monks - cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and a small arsenal of advanced weaponry. Their mission is to convert anyone and everyone to the Electric Church. But there is just one snag: Conversion means death.
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Holy Dystopia
- By Amazon Customer on 08-21-16
By: Jeff Somers
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Prador Moon
- A Novel of the Polity, Book 1
- By: Neal Asher
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style. This original novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.
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Narration Terrible; Prador’s Moon has Big Ideas and Epic Scale
- By For_the_Love_of_Books on 08-09-18
By: Neal Asher
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Tarantula
- A John Milton Short Story
- By: Mark Dawson
- Narrated by: David Thorpe
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet John Milton. He considers himself an artisan. A craftsman. His trade is murder. Milton is the man the government sends after you when everything else has failed. Ruthless. Brilliant. Anonymous. Lethal. You wouldn't pick him out of a crowd but you wouldn't want to be on his list. In this second dip into his case files (see 1000 Yards for a further novella), Milton is sent to Italy to investigate the death of a colleague from Group 15.
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John Milton tries to exit British intelligence
- By Wayne on 06-03-16
By: Mark Dawson
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Cold City
- Repairman Jack: Early Years Trilogy, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Alexander Cendese
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.
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Fun, as long you don't think too much
- By Andrew Pollack on 01-17-14
By: F. Paul Wilson
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Inquisitor
- By: Mitchell Hogan
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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To Inquisitor Angel Xia, it was just another corporate killing on a backwater planet. But as the bodies begin to pile up and she finds herself a target, she realizes she's stepped on one toe too many. Barely escaping attempts on her life by powerful agents with seemingly limitless reach and influence, Angel senses even her co-Inquisitors can't be trusted. But as the web tightens, she receives a cryptic message from a computer program claiming to be a little girl in desperate need of her help.
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meh
- By James Cross on 08-17-15
By: Mitchell Hogan
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Company Town
- By: Madeline Ashby
- Narrated by: Cecelia Kim
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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They call it Company Town - a city-size oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bioengineered enhancements. As such, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig - making her doubly an outsider as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire.
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Different
- By J.G. Brandt on 01-16-17
By: Madeline Ashby
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The Long Way Down
- Daniel Faust, Book 1
- By: Craig Schaefer
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody knows the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas like Daniel Faust, a sorcerer for hire and ex-gangster who uses black magic and bullets to solve his clients' problems. When an old man comes seeking vengeance for his murdered granddaughter, what looks like a simple job quickly spirals out of control. Soon Daniel stands in the crossfire between a murderous porn director; a corrupt cop with a quick trigger finger; and his own former employer, a racket boss who isn't entirely human.
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Urban fantasy noir. Done right..
- By Cliff on 02-19-15
By: Craig Schaefer
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Weapons of Choice
- Axis of Time, Book 1
- By: John Birmingham
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 20 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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History is rewritten in an instant as the future smashes into the past, and high-tech hardware goes head to head with World War Two technology. In the chaos that ensues, thousands are killed, but the maelstrom has only just begun. The veterans of Pearl Harbor have never seen a helicopter, or a cruise missile - let alone nanotechnology, ceramic bullets, and F22 Raptor stealth jetfighters. Allied and Axis forces are then caught in a desperate struggle to gain the upper hand.
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The story line is a political stretch
- By Bruce on 04-18-15
By: John Birmingham
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abstract art
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In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. In the present, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia....
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Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D, which Arctor takes in massive doses, gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself.
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Drugs are bad
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Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy - from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he’s confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.
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Starts Confusing, Gets Exciting, Ends Awesome
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Hardwired
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Ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, "hardwired" via skull sockets directly to his lethal electronic hardware, teams up with Sarah, an equally cyborized gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals.
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The Best Cyberpunk I Have Read
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What listeners say about Altered Carbon
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Jake Williams
- 09-22-07
Altered Carbon
Sex, violence and drugs become a strange brew in this futuristic novel with the premise that what we are can be contained in a small device implanted into any body. The hero, Takashi Kovacs, is a detective (of sorts). His neural systems are enhanced.
When people die in this future, except for Catholics, they can be brought back in another body if their device (called a stack) is not destroyed. Catholics do not have stacks.
So Kovacs, who is disliked by almost everyone in the novel, is called by a rich man, who believes his suicide was murder.
With more plot twists than a tub full of snakes, the story unfolds complete with some of the nastiest villans around.
If you like plenty of violence and strange machinations, read this novel. The writing is colorful and interesting and the plot moves along wihtout undue burdening by explantion of the science, politics and culutres involved.
The ending has a twisted nobility that I found appealing.
This is not high art, but it is darn good listening.
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140 people found this helpful
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- Richard
- 05-07-15
Bad audio
Audio is of horrible quality. It's almost as if audio engineer was loosing hearing and compensating by boosting lower frequencies.
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124 people found this helpful
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Overall
- S. Casey
- 05-02-05
Harder Than Gibson
The Takeshi Kovacs (pronounced Kovotch) novels have revitalised interest in the long-dormant cyberpunk genre. Mr. Morgan has created a believable future, with a wonderful anti-hero in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, Holden Caulfield, and Yancy Slide. This story has all of the action you'd expect from a work like DaVinci Code, but less slipshod and implausible. It's harder and more brutal than the early woks of Gibson, yet it maintains a three-dimensional quality rarely found in the sci-fi.
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88 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Rusty
- 07-25-05
Very good - very long as well
I really enjoyed this book and recommend it. It is a Raymond Chandler-esque sci-fi private eye story. A couple of caveats. It was graphically violent. The violence was appropriate but close going over the top at some points. In the beginning I worried the book was going to be none-stop blood and smashed faces and I considered stopping, but I'm glad I didn't. There is very graphic sex as well, which isn't unusual, but somehow it feels funny having a guy read it to me! The book is so long that I wished I had a cheat sheet of the cast of characters, as sometimes he'd start talking about someone and I wouldn't remember who it was for quite a while. Overall, I'd call this Blade Runner meets The Big Sleep.
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82 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lydell
- 04-15-09
Sci-Fi actually made up of real people.
OK, for those who do not like sex in their reading leave NOW. It's not a major point of the story (this is not debbie does sci-fi), but it is integral to intereactions of a few characters and it shows the mentality of people who have many different versions of reality and the culture they are in. Basically, if you can get passed the fact the book actually shows how normal people are and act (ie we all curse and have sex), then you will find very interesting characters and a really good who done it sort of story. If you follow on to the other two books like I did, you will find an interesting universe that is severly self referential (pay attention in the book because things will come up later!).
I happen to really like the job this narrator did on the books as well (not the same guy on all three but this guy is my favorite Takeshi Kovachs), and I really think he was able to give life and personality to a story that is in essence, a recap of past events. It felt like someone was telling me a war story over drinks in a bar at times, and for me that's a good thing.
I really enjoy my sci fi scruffy and unrefined. If you do too then you will love this series.
PS. For those who shrank at the torture scene please realize that if you don't feel the weight of the torture it stops being the abborant act it truly is. So your gut reaction is exactly what the author was going for.
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- Charles Joshua Bain
- 10-27-19
If you like the show then skip this.
if you are a fan of the TV show then you may not want to try this. This is one of the rare times where the book is by far worse than the show. It comes across clunky and alot of times is basically a really bad porno. I really can not express enough how bad this was.
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52 people found this helpful
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- David
- 04-21-13
Cyberpunk meets noir thriller
This was pretty good contemporary cyberpunk. Morgan doesn't have William Gibson's way with words, but his characters are more interesting and his pacing and action scenes are much better.
There is the potential for a space opera here - the world of Altered Carbon is a far future in which humans have spread to the stars, and the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, was born on another planet, but this story takes place entirely on Earth, in "Bay City" (what used to be San Francisco). That and all the Japanese names and yakuza and such seem to be conscious nods to Gibson.
Kovacs is your basic bad dude ex-commando killing machine with a tortured past. He used to work for "Envoy Corps"; in this far future, the U.N. is apparently the interplanetary government and it trains super-soldiers as "Envoys" to go do all the usual killing and pacifying for what turns out to be corporate interests and rich people. Same as it ever was. Kovacs gets disillusioned and turns rogue, and the book opens with a criminal enterprise he and his girlfriend are running going very badly. This is how we are introduced to the most interesting technology in this world: "resleeving." Basically, human minds can now be digitized and transferred ("sleeved") in new bodies. People convicted of crimes can be sentenced to virtual "storage" — your mind goes into a data bank for some period of time (potentially centuries) and in the meantime, someone else can buy the right to walk around in your body. Mix this with artificial intelligences and virtual worlds and you can see the possibilities for cons, grand schemes, and cunning plans is enormous.
Kovacs winds up on Earth, freed from his virtual sentence following his botched enterprise in the prologue, because a very rich "Methuselah" (someone who's been resleeved repeatedly for hundreds of years) wants him to do a job for him. Mr. Bancroft died, violently, a few days ago, and upon being resleeved from his backup storage, he of course has no memory of what happened prior to his last backup. The police say either he killed himself or his wife killed him. Bancroft refuses to believe either scenario, and wants Kovacs to find out who actually blew his head off and why.
This is where Altered Carbon crosses cyberpunk with a hard-boiled detective novel. Kovacs has to go looking for clues, and of course runs into all sorts of people with conflicting interests all of whom threaten him or bribe him to do what they want. The way in which he eventually uncovers what's really going on, gets caught up in an extensive web and snagged on multiple hooks and conflicting obligations, was quite skillfully plotted. He eventually unleashes bloody vengeance as is typical for this sort of story, and of course he runs up against multiple dangerous dames with whom he has a lot of graphically and sometimes laughably-described sex.
If you are fond of the "hard-boiled lone wolf bangs babes and carves a swath of bloody vengeance" genre, then Altered Carbon is the book for you. The whole digitized humans angle contains no ideas that haven't been floating around in cyberpunk for decades now, and certainly other cyberpunk novels have been written with a noir feel to them, but this is the best of the lot I have read recently.
There were some authorial indulgences (the sex scenes, the Jimi Hendrix AI-run hotel, and a whole lot of prostitutes) which are characteristic of a freshman SF novel (though I kind of liked the Hendrix). But overall, this paid tribute to its predecessors while not being wholly derivative, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, and wouldn't mind seeing a little more extra-solar SF next time.
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49 people found this helpful
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- PF
- 07-13-07
Future Marlowe Noir
Brilliantly imagined, carefully worked out, and intensely detailed, Morgan's somewhat Philip-Marlowe-ish future is gripping. His core premise is that death has been (mostly) conquered; most deaths can be undone by re-"sleeving" the dead person's consciousness, or "stack," in a different body. He's worked through a consistent vision of how much (and how little) that alters society, conduct, and people -- exactly the sort of exercise good sci-fi does best. If you like Sam Spade and thoughtful SF, you'll like Altered Carbon.
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45 people found this helpful
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- David
- 05-05-05
Best Sci-Fi/Private Eye Book of last ten years!
I read this one a few years ago and highly recommend. If you liked Ender's Game or Snowcrash... you'll love this one. I don't want to spoil anything about this book by putting details of this intricate plot in my review, but if you enjoy science fiction or mysteries... then this one is for you. Enjoy!
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43 people found this helpful
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- Richard
- 09-22-05
Great Sci-Fi, not sanitized for your protection
An exciting read to unravel a unique crime. The story exposes us to a wide slice of future life, the "have" and the "have nots" and how their lives are incredibly differentiatied through technology. If you want to find deeper meaning, the story allows you to explore what makes an individual unique, and whether or not being in someone elses body changes who we are. We're also dragged through the gutter numerous times, so prudes or those seeking a sheltered existance beware. Good, but gritty sci-fi.
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38 people found this helpful