Somebody Wrote Blade Runner as a Detective Who Hates Everyone

The premise is the best part, and Morgan knows it

Here’s the hook, and it’s a great one. In this future, your consciousness lives on a “cortical stack,” a little disc slotted into your spine. Your body is just a “sleeve.” Bodies are hardware. You are software. Get shot in the head, no problem, they spin you up in a new sleeve. Real death, actual death, only happens if someone destroys the stack itself. So the whole culture reorganizes around that one idea, and Morgan is ruthless about following it to its ugly conclusions. The rich never die. The poor get resleeved into whatever meat is available, which might be an old man, a stranger, a different gender, a body that was in prison. Religious people refuse resleeving on principle and get walked over for it.

Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-soldier, an ex-Envoy, which in this world means a kind of elite trained-killer-slash-spy who can drop into any sleeve on any planet and adapt in hours. He wakes up on Earth in a new body he didn’t choose, hired by a stupendously wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft to solve a murder. Whose murder? Bancroft’s own. Bancroft was found with his head blown apart, but he had a remote backup, so he woke up again the next morning missing about forty-eight hours of memory and very much wanting to know who pulled the trigger. The police call it suicide. Bancroft does not believe a man like him would ever kill himself. That arrogance, by the way, is the whole engine of the book.

It’s a locked-room mystery where the victim survived and doesn’t remember dying. I mean, come on. That’s a fantastic setup.

What works, what genuinely doesn’t, and the fight I keep having with myself about it

What works is the texture. Morgan builds a Bay City (a drowned, rebuilt San Francisco) that feels grimy and lived-in and real, all neon and rain and clinics that smell of disinfectant. The action is genuinely some of the best I’ve read in the genre. There’s a sequence in a place called Head in the Clouds and a raid that goes sideways, and Morgan writes bodies breaking with a precision that is honestly a little disturbing. He was a guy writing his debut and swinging for the fences, and you can feel the ambition in every page.

The concept-work is the real prize though. There’s a scene where Kovacs meets a little girl who is actually a grandmother resleeved into a child’s body because it was the only sleeve the family could afford, and she talks about her grandkids in this cracked, tired, adult voice, and it landed on me like a brick. That’s the kind of moment that justifies the whole science-fiction apparatus. The idea isn’t decoration. It’s used to say something about class, and dignity, and who gets to keep their own face.

Now the part where I stop gushing.

The plot is a knot. Somewhere around the two-thirds mark I genuinely lost the thread of who did what to whom and why, and I had to flip back forty pages to reorient. There’s a torture-interrogation sequence in a virtual environment that goes on and on and on, and while I understand what Morgan was doing (Kovacs experiences it in a female sleeve, which is a deliberate and pointed choice), it reads like the book stopping to prove how far it’s willing to go. And it’s willing to go far. The violence is relentless, the sex is graphic in a way that feels more like a dare than a seduction, and there’s a strain of nihilism that occasionally tips from “hardboiled” into “edgelord.”

Here’s the thing that keeps nagging me. I liked it a lot, and I’m not totally sure I should have. Am I giving Morgan credit for depth, or did the brutality just successfully impress the seventeen-year-old who still lives somewhere in the back of my skull? I’ve turned that over more than once. Kovacs is a cool character in the way a knife is cool, which is to say you admire the craftsmanship and you also don’t want him near you. He barely changes. He feels almost nothing. And in a book about what makes a person a person, having a lead who is essentially a beautifully engineered weapon is either the point or a real weakness, and I flip on which one depending on the day.

Quick tangent, because I can’t not mention it: yes, there’s a Netflix show. I watched it after. The show softens Kovacs, gives him a tragic love story, cleans up the plot into something you can follow on a couch with a beer. The book is meaner and smarter and worse-behaved, and I’ll take the book, but I get why the show made the choices it did. Some of what’s on the page would be genuinely unwatchable filmed straight.

Strip away the resleeving and the neon and the noir, and this is a book asking one nasty question: if you could survive any death and buy any body, would you stay a person, or would you become a god who has forgotten what dying costs everybody else?

About Richard K. Morgan

Richard K. Morgan (sometimes credited as Richard Morgan) was a former English-language teacher who bounced around teaching abroad before Altered Carbon landed in 2002 as his debut and immediately made him a name in SF. He went on to write the other two Kovacs books, a couple of standalone thrillers (Market Forces, Thirteen), and then swerved hard into gritty, subversive fantasy with the A Land Fit for Heroes trilogy, which put a queer, furious protagonist at the center of a swords-and-sorcery world and dared readers to flinch. He also wrote for video games, notably Crysis 2 and the Syndicate reboot. His whole deal, as far as I can tell, is taking a genre’s comfortable furniture and setting it on fire. Not always subtle. Rarely boring.

If this one got its hooks in you, read these next

• Neuromancer by William Gibson for the granddaddy of the whole aesthetic, colder and stranger and more poetic than Morgan, less of a straight thriller.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick since Morgan literally won the award named after this guy, and the “what makes a person real” question runs straight through both.
• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi if you want another slick, brutal, identity-bending far-future heist that doesn’t hold your hand.
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson for cyberpunk with a wicked sense of humor to cleanse the palate after all of Morgan’s grimness.

For your book club

1. If bodies are just sleeves and your mind can be backed up, is real death still meaningful? Would the culture in this book treat human life as more disposable or more precious?
2. Kovacs barely changes across the novel. Is that a flaw, or is emotional flatness the honest result of what Envoy training and endless resleeving would do to a person?
3. The book uses resleeving to expose class: the rich are effectively immortal, the poor take whatever body they can get. How close does that feel to inequalities we already live with?
4. The virtual-torture sequence deliberately puts Kovacs in a female sleeve. Did that choice feel like meaningful commentary to you, or like the book pushing shock for its own sake?
5. Bancroft cannot believe a man like him would ever choose to die. What does his certainty reveal about power, and did you trust his version of events?

I still think about that laundromat. Something about reading a book this cold and this loud in a bright fluorescent room full of strangers folding towels. Kovacs would have hated it there. Or maybe he wouldn’t have noticed at all, which is sort of the whole problem with him, and the whole reason I can’t quite let the book go…