![]() ![]() Kovacs went rogue after serving for years as an Envoy. Envoys are soldiers, diplomats, spies, hypnotists capable of subtly influencing people, trained to perfect recall, conversant with multiple languages and cultures. Actually he is not a special forces soldier - he is an Envoy of the UN Protectorate.Īs the human race spread across Morgan's universe, people carried their age-old feuds into space and developed some new ones. So, they can take over a new body and instantly put their own combat skills into operation. Special forces soldiers like Kovacs receive training embedded directly into their stacks. Hence, the peculiar conjunction of Japanese forename and East European surname and a tendency to occasionally lapse into quoting haiku (in the novels). Kovacs comes from a planet that was colonised by East European labour hired by a Japanese company. That way, human beings can travel anywhere more or less instantly.ĭifferent planets have been colonised by different nations at various times. Data from stacks can be transferred through wormholes ('needled') almost instantaneously to distant planets, which have been colonised. It is also possible to upload stacks into virtual environments that are indistinguishable from reality, while being vastly speeded up.Īll this means that humans can do delightfully risky things and indulge in an entire range of perversions that are impossible in our current state of the art. In the Morganverse, if somebody wants to travel from A to B, the simplest way to do so is to upload data from the stack into a 'sleeve' at B. Uploading of consciousness in this fashion is something that the Ray Kurzweil brand of futurists are already talking about. The rich keep clones of their own bodies in storage and continuously save the data from their stacks to an alternate location.īodies can be cultured with special neural enhancements. Real death happens only if the stack is destroyed.Ĭriminals are punished by being put into storage with their stacks decommissioned and not given bodies.īodies are therefore, referred to as 'sleeves' in the 24th-century patios. The consciousness lives on, in a new body, complete with memories. If the body dies, whether through old age, illness, violence or accident, the stack can be retrieved and uploaded to a new body. That chip contains their consciousness, their essential 'me', and it records all their memories and sensory inputs in real-time. Kovacs, like everyone else in that fictional universe is close to immortal.Įverybody wears an implanted chip (called a stack) embedded in their spines at the base of the brain. Morgan plays around with multiple plotlines across a backdrop that involves improvised variations on immortality, large-scale violence, complex scientific concepts, virtual environments indistinguishable from reality, small-scale violence, musings on consciousness, bits and pieces of poetry, random doses of philosophy, complicated sexual deviancies and, need I mention, more dollops of violence? Richard Morgan created a richly complex universe in a string of novels with Kovacs as the first-person, anti-hero protagonist. He is released from prison and hired as a detective with a rather odd brief: A billionaire wants to know who murdered him (the billionaire) in a manner that seems like a 24th-century riff on the classic locked-room murder mystery.įans of the cult cyberpunk series starring Takeshi Kovacs would not be. ![]() Kovacs is a former soldier serving a penal sentence. He is played by Joel Kinnaman and Will Yun Lee. The Netflix series Altered Carbon features a hero, Takeshi Kovacs, who is both 40 years old and 290 years old. ![]() Devangshu Datta enjoyed the Netflix series thoroughly! ![]()
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