A Man with a Code

[coalescent]

Browsing through the latest SFX (#130) this lunchtime, I came across a short interview with Richard Morgan, by Jonathan Wright (p36):

"The whole thing with Kovacs is that I wanted him to be a mascot for the dangers of falling for heroism as a concept," says Morgan. "Bleak anti-heroes are all very well and I love them, but you’ve got to be aware of what you're dealing with. Take The Man With No Name, the Clint Eastwood movies. Yeah, he's cool and it would be cool to be able to shoot like that, but you've got to be aware of what comes with that.

"It alarmed me a bit when the first book came out, Altered Carbon, and a number of people said, 'Oh yeah, Kovacs, he's quite violent, but he's a man of honour, he’s got a code.' This chimes with those horrible things that people like Barbara Windsor used to say about the Krays: 'he was a lovely fella, bought flowers for his mum.' You're thinking, 'Whoa, whoa, hold on a minute.'"

To which you can only say: well, quite. I remember people loudly saying the same thing about Spike during Buffy seasons five and six (almost literally so, given his friendship with Joyce). But! Then I turn to page 92 of the same issue, where there's a review of Morgan's latest, Woken Furies, and find this:

The first grown-up book that Richard Morgan read as a child was From Russia With Love. He soon found his way to the Saint books of Leslie Charteris. If Bond and Templar now conjure images of '60s kitsch—Sean Connery and Roger Moore quipping their way to stardom—remember that the books were infinitely darker than their screen versions. Seen through this prism, Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs is an anti-hero with antecedents, a violent man in a violent world but not a man without ethics.

The reviewer? Jonathan Wright, of course. I wonder which piece he wrote first ...

Also, since I've not yet read it, someone satisfy my curiosity: in what way, exactly, is the carbon in Altered Carbon altered?