Even the little robot ball, it's never referred to as a child, as a product of their union but being like a child. It's like marrying a chink, total defeat.
(No spoiler review)
Just finished reading Altered Carbon. I was a big fan of the scifi neo-noir detective action adventure, but I could really tell that it was a novel written in the late 90s and published in 02. The way sex is used is thoroughly unmodern, though imo it was mostly kept within the realm of relevance to the plot. The way religion is treated smacks of years pre-libtard BTFO compilations and science vs creationism debates, on occasion. The main villains are hateable, but im not convinced they are extremely believable in retrospect. While reading my immersion wasn't broken. (a high praise imo)
The background world-building is only just alright, with most of the creativity being in the far-future designer drugs utilized throughout. The scifi elements were mostly kept muted, which was fine with me. Some of the details of the world mentioned offhand frankly sounded more interesting than the main story at times, but I see that more as a reflection of good writing than a slight against the plot.
The pacing overall is pretty good, though the final act had some trudging moments.
The ending had enough loose threads hanging to invest me in possibly reading the next book in the trilogy. But I think I would've preferred the way the ending was told have been done slightly differently. I'll chalk that up to personal taste.
If I had to give a number rating, I'd probably go with a solid 6.5
Have some completely unrelated images to make up for the wordpoasting
I haven't read Altered Carbon, but I have read a sequel/same universe book by the author called "Thin Air" and 11 years later he hasn't gotten over the issue of the background being more interesting than the story. The corporate espionage stuff is nice but it takes a backseat to the world, almost as if the story is just a vehicle to guide you on a history of (Mars in this case) the world. A grim world but well though out. Because of the failed terraforming of Mars, the atmosphere is about the same as the slopes of the Andes or Tibet, so the current Martian race is made of Andean-Tibetan mix coolies.
There's a throwaway line about Humanity finding evidence of alien life, and realizing that they were so far away to have perished before the signals arrived, so funding into the research stopped almost instantly. State of the art facilities are left to rot and become a tired, quiet community college. The running background theme is short term profit for long term pain, and without spoilers the main story reflects this as well. It wasn't good enough for me to consider picking up the author's other works, but not a waste of my time either.
