Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Altered Carbon is a post-cyberpunk murder mystery where the mystery is convoluted, all the suspects are guilty in the most complicated way possible and the actions of the characters aren’t directed by personal needs or desires, but by the need to take the plot to as many interesting and seedy locations as possible in the imagined future of the world.
The central premise of the world is that in the future technology makes it possible to implant a piece of hardware referred to as the “cortical stack” at the head of the spinal column. This device captures and retains a digital image of the consciousness of the body and this image can then be off-loaded and transferred to different bodies either synthetic or organic, while criminals and the elderly/poor who can no longer afford to pay for bodies are stored in data mainframes. The economics of this activity is not fully explained, but it seems that bodies are considered to be a public resource as even Catholics who are apparently the only religious group still existent that objects to the use of this technology have cortical stacks installed after birth, they just have a religious waiver that bars the re-installing of the saved image in a new body, also a lot of the plot points and the threat of ‘real death’ if we allow that a digital copy of person is a continuation of that person could be solved by networking wireless and encryption.
I find the idea of digital copies of people to be fascinating for the questions about identity, soul and life that it raises, but this story spends very little time on examining any of the interesting moral questions or philosophical nuances. Instead it uses it as an excuse to indulge in graphic sex, wanton destruction of bodies and virtual torture to maintain a sense of urgency and grittiness and resorting far too often to the main character who is ostensibly acting as a private investigator in the course of the novel inflicting cortical stack destruction or “real death” on various characters, mostly black market bystanders, to keep the tension up. What the story does do is take us to a variety of places inspired by this world. The majority of the action takes place in the San Francisco bay area where the main character is loaded from a offworld transmission from his home planet into a body in the Alcatraz sleeving facility and then visits a variety of places that showcase the gritty underbelly of this future society as he investigates, he visits a wealthy mansion, an AI owned and operated hotel, a futuristic AI monitored police station with virtual holding and interogation, a couple of whore-houses, a black-market body chop-shop, a bloody no-broadcasts fighting ring and the like. It is definitely more of a setting story than anything else.
The main character Takashi Kovacs is a ex-soldier who was recruited in his childhood and given special training to become what they call an Envoy, this is psychological conditioning and mystic training to give him the ability to easily adapt to whatever situation he is put in and collect data and put pieces together to build a picture of the truth from intuition without having to rely on any technological boosts or limitations of the particular mind/body that his cortical stack image is currently loaded into. This is said to make him an excellent diplomat and investigator, but it seems from flashbacks in this novel that the Envoy corp was deployed by the military as a black-ops special forces combat assassins and Kovacs occasionally describes being an Envoy as being trained to let everything that holds you back go and become a mindless killing machine and living weapon. I find the combination of these two skillsets and applications of the Envoy corp to be at odds with each other and would make for an exceptionally poor private investigator in the long run, but it does neatly explain the combination of counter-intuitive plot leaps necessary to put together the pieces of the puzzle in this story and the wanton bloodshed unleashed in the ‘investigation’. I was also dissatisfied with how much the story talked up the Envoy powers but then left Kovacs stumbling around allowing himself to be captured, tortured, immobilized and nearly killed only to be saved by third parties.
The treatment of female characters in this story is reprehensible. In the course of the investigation that Kovacs is hired to do he manages to have sex with pretty much every supporting female character, through no fault of his own. He sleeps with the wife of the guy who hired him because she is super rich and able to buy biotech that makes her all but irresistible and she wants to bribe him to stop the investigation. He then sleeps with the Police detective that first starts trying to stop his investigation and get in his way because he is wearing her boyfriends body while her boyfriend serves a sentence for corruption, she gets angry at him for having sex with the rich woman and then immediately has sex with him and then cooperates with him as he breaks hundreds of laws to complete his investigation. And he he also has a drug fueled something with the bodyguard of the main villain during a brief interlude which then ‘motivates’ her to save his life twice later on in the story.
The writing is decent, in a hard-boiled cyber-noir style. I definitely enjoyed parts of the book, but over all it was a convoluted mess that didn’t attempt to bear out the setting other than indulging the aesthetic of the style.