Altered Carbon has been filmed (twice?) and transformed into two or so seasons of Netflix series; neither of which I have watched. I understand that they have their own fanbases… I have read the book, written by Richard K. Morgan, and that is my only reference point, I don’t know anything about the film adaptations, nor how much they stick to the same story or deviate from it.

Altered Carbon, the book, is an imaginative and richly detailed cyberpunk-ish sci-fi story set in a far future when humanity has made the jump to the stars. Slow ships are still on their way to new planets, while fast ships were already there, set up colonies, and made contact back with Earth. And on top of that, humanity in Altered Carbon has left their bodies behind — to a degree. People have so-called “stacks” in the base of their necks, where their memories and/or personalities are stored. How much of it is the human itself? Hard to tell, and a topic that is often discussed by the people in the story and in their background.

Because generally it seems like an easy choice to use that stack: Get run over by a car, get a new body and keep living. What’s not to like?
Well, there are religious concerns: An “old sect” (so named by a cop) called “The Catholics” believe that the stack does not contain the soul; therefore they habitually set it down in writing that they do not want to be “re-sleeved”, i.e., re-awakened in a new body (“sleeve”).

That makes the Catholics a prime target for sadistic fucks who like to hurt and kill people, because most people you hurt and kill come right back and sue you, but if they don’t come back they are easy prey.

That went dark fast, right?

Humanity, despite conquering more planets and creating mostly independent colonies in space, have not left behind their baser instincts. Even several centuries down the road, there are still corruption, crime, prostitution, drug abuse and wanton violence — and wars.

Takeshi Kovacs

Main character Takeshi Kovacs is a former special forces soldier who went rogue after some very unpleasant war crimes; he took revenge on a former superior, then started to live as a criminal to look after himself instead of wasting his time killing people for the interests of powerful organisations. Part of that comes from his sympathies for Quellism, a freedom-centered anti-authoritarian philosophy that has developed on his home planet, part of it from his guilty conscience about his own violent past as a gang member, later killer, later cybersoldier in some pretty unappetizing corporate wars.

Well, he got caught and put “on stack”, meaning, shelved without a body, for more than 100 years.

Laurens Bancroft

Until one day an ultra-rich guy on old Earth has presumably committed suicide; everyone says so, it looks so, there is no trace of any other thing happening… but the rich guy does not believe it, because why would he committ suicide with a whole rack of clones waiting in cold storage? After his “suicide” it took all of 12 hours and he was back … minus the memories of his last day.

So would he try to kill himself and simply forget about all his clones? Not bloody likely.

The rich guy has lived for an eternity, switching from body to body again and again, until he has little in common with random normies. Because whily re-sleeving is common, body don’t come cheap, so living eternally, having clones on ice and keeping personality backups every 24 hours, that does not come cheap: only the super-rich can do that.

He made a lot of money over the centuries, but what he did not make a lot is friends. And so he figures he buys one; picks a cool cybersoldier gone rogue and bullies him into investigating the case to find out what everyone tries to hide. That decision pulls Kovacs back from the stack, and flings him far away from his home world, right into the body of a former cop who has been stacked himself, with his body in cold storage in case someone wants it.

To no-one’s surprise, there are people who are opposed to one or several parts of this. Some hate that cop. Others hate that his body gets re-used. Others don’t want any snooping in Bancroft’s death. Others yet don’t want Kovacs back in the world.

Memorable characters

Altered Carbon features a number of fascinating characters; a family, a likeable AI, rich bastards, poor bastards, cops with mohawks, ruffians on street and on corporate level.

We get to know Kovacs a lot because the story is his; we get to know Ortega, who used to be the lover of Kovac’s new body, back when it still belonged to its former inhabitant.

My personal favourite is a cool hired gun called Trepp, someone with real main-character potential who would have deserved her own book. She is a complex person with a very human attitude: she likes to have fun times, likes to hang out and party, and tries to balance the Samurai work ethics of a corporate killer with a strong sense of personal honour – in a world where the daimyos don’t share the same views about “honour”.

We also get a good look at what it might mean for a person to live for hundreds of years and be married to the same partner for hundreds of years, and being super-rich while doing that.

And there is an AI that runs a hotel, which we get to know a bit. A nice hotel, one that would be fun to meet. And its deep programming is imbued with a strong desire to have guests and make their stay pleasant.

Overall the reader gets the impression that it does not pay to understimate people: everyone has a story and a background, and even a random encounter may have good skills or knowledge.

Inconsistencies

There are some inconsistencies in the story, especially in the morals. The most glaring example is Takeshi Kovacs himself. By reputation and admission a bad motherfucker who has killed and tortured like crazy, he is rather too likeable for that. He does some pretty nice things for people and hesitates to do the gravest forms of violence. And when it comes to torture, he takes it on the chin, but he does not like to dish it out: he leaves that to a personality simulation run by an AI.

The book tries to explain it with the influence of the body that one occupies at a time. Kovacs gets resleeved into the body of a cop, and that does influence him somewhat, so we could give the change a pass for that. However, he gets re-sleeved into another body later on, and he still has these moral blocks.

Why is that?

I assume it has two causes: One is the author’s personality: Even though I don’t know him personally, I read between the lines that Richard Morgan is no fan of crass bodily harm. He likes a bit of action, but there are limits. Which is good! We want nice and funny people to write our books, not unhinged sadists.

Cause two is that he wants us, the audience, to like Takeshi Kovacs, and that would be hard if he was really the bastard he used to be, by all accounts, in his past. Audiences tend to like people who are tough but ultimately good at heart. And that is what we get in Takeshi Kovacs. Tough but good at heart.

So we have a likeable main character with great combat skills. There is nothing wrong with that. There is just some unexplained disconnect with who he, by reputation, was and who he, as we witness him, is.

Otherwise it is not completely clear how Earth has so many grown bodies going around given that they treat them with such disregard. Its not as if they grow on trees, and growing them in vats takes funds. Where do the stacks of the people go whose sleeves get rented or bought?

Even though one of the ultra-rich claims with disdain that the common nobodies breed all the time, the economy of bodies and the whereabouts of the original stacks remains a bit underdeveloped.

The mystery

The big mystery in need of solving — the reason for getting Kovacs off the ice and into the cop — is not actually that deep: I figured out the raw structure of the solution right during Kovacs’ first conversation with Bancroft. And I am not a genius. So I should think that someone like Bancroft himself, with the smarts of a top-educated businessman and the accumulated lifetime experience of six or ten generations, should have been able to figure out the “whodunnit” by himself pretty quickly.

But that is not so important. Much more important is the world that these characters inhabit.

Altered Carbon

What is “Altered Carbon” supposed to mean?

It is about the way these people treat lives and bodies. They regard bodies more or less like cars. You get sleeved in one and run around in it, until it breaks down and you buy a new one: a shitty snyth if you have little money, a used one if you have a little more, and a super-nice optimized one if you have the cash. If you are out of luck you get no new body at all and get “stacked”, waiting on a shelf if maybe one day you come back, or you don’t.

Only the Catholics treat a body like more than a commodity, and they get (literally) shafted for it.

Obviously a body still has characteristics that colour a person. as we do witness how the re-sleeving changes how people feel about each other; how Kovacs finds the girlfriend of his new body very attractive while in that body, but when he is in another body he feels more distant.

And over time, if someone re-sleeves into too different bodies too often, it takes a toll, and they lose their own self. We get an example of that, one guy who dies too often and comes back as tall or short, man or woman, synth or bionic, again and again, until he is no longer quite sane.
A good argument for the policy of the rich people with their clones: re-sleeving into a copy of their old self, keeping it together.

Don’t alter carbon too much.

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The blogpost main image is, in keeping with the topic of the book, a wild mix of carbon and an AI-generated cityscape.