Speaking of "Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions," some time back, I read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, but never got around to booklogging it. In many ways, it's similar to the Asher book, though, so I might as well take care of it today.
This is the first of a series of books following the exploits of Takeshi Kovacs, who may or may not be a UN Special Envoy (it's a little unclear to me what his exact status is). He's an unpleasant fellow with a lot of blood on his hands, who has been hired to investigate a murder.
Of course, as in any private-eye novel, things quickly turn out to be more complicated than that. In this world, consciousness can be tranferred from one body to another, with bodies being referred to as "sleeves." The body Kovacs is using turns out to have a history, which gets him some unwanted attention, and brings in some unpleasant elements who just might be involved in the original killing. And, of course, his employer's motivations are somewhat questionable, and he's not sure who he can trust, etc.
Morgan does a good job of translating the violent amoral private eye genre into a science fiction context-- think Robert B. Parker's Spenser with body-swapping and less armchair psycholanalysis. It's pretty bleak and very violent, but the story is well done. I'll probably wait for the others to hit mass-market paperback, rather than the trade paper of this edition, but they'll make good airplane reading.
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I read this sometime back, but the thing I remember and liked is that the story is exposing some consequenses of understanding consciousness. I saw a good shorter story in one of those book anthologies do this also, but the idea is that if we really come to understand conciousness and its mechanisms, and it is like the nightmare of Searle and those anti-AI philosophers, then we can make copies, we could learn to copy pieces, etc. What the heck is an individual then? I feel like we underestimate what physical bodies do to conciousness, and this book touches on that.
Sounds sort of like "Kiln People" but without the political philosophy or the metaphysics...
I've read all the Kovacs books and, hmm, enjoyed is the wrong word. They fascinate me. One of the things I've been wondering is this: if two people go into separate VR chambers, then enter a shared VR where their avatars have sex with the each other, can those 2 people have been said to have sex with each other?
Oh and it's pretty clear by the time you've read all the books that Kovacs was, at one time, a UN Envoy but no longer is. Though he still has all the skills and training.
MKK
I read it a few years ago, after all the hoo haa when it came out. I gave up half way through.
I don't recall ever reading a noir detective thriller, but I think thats what this book was, except updated to the future. Frankly I found it boring and predictable.
Just before I stopped reading it, I thought "I bet he gets to use one of those super duper bodies"
Lo and behold, he did.
Your review matches pretty well with mine. I think markk, above, raises an interesting point that I only briefly mentioned in my review, and that's the psychology of the body. Much recent research (well...recent when I was getting my psych degree a dozen years ago, I've not kept up with the field) has shown that our secondary nervous and endocrine systems contribute extensively to our psychological and emotional make-up; IOW, what we commonly think of as "the mind" is more dependent on the entire body than the completely CNS-dominant concept that earlier theories assumed. Morgan's book perhaps takes this sort of thinking a bit too literally, but it's not unreasonable, and it's certainly interesting.
I just picked up the second book this weekend, but there's no telling when I'll get to read it, much less review it.
The second book is more expansive in its scope.
Interesting twists, not so much a straight up "who done it". Worth reading.
Haven't got a hold of the third.