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.

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale is chilling in its premise and powerful in the way that it uses its imagined future to shine a bright spotlight onto the difficulties of being a woman.

Coming from a conservative background it would be easy for me to take offense at the portrayal of a right wing totalitarian society rising from a Christian-values driven sect to take over America. However that would be counter-productive to understanding the story. The story is flawed as a deconstruction of the religious right in that it presents the consequences of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and ignores the implausibility of transforming Massachusetts of all places into a bastion of religious oppression. But that does not take away from the need for this story to be heard and the power of Atwood’s portrayals of womanhood.

The story shows us primarily how women are treated in the society of Gilead and how they are forced to think about themselves and everyone around them as a consequence of the judgements and perspectives of those around them. The society shapes expectations and hands down punishments that place women in the position of property and forces their value towards their ability to produce children. The writing is powerful and takes care to showcase a variety of ways that the people in this restrictive society act and react to the repression, expectations and societal pressures. Women are shown in various ways bending themselves to the restrictions that are placed on them, joining in the repression, making themselves into nothing and shaping themselves to meet the expectations around them. They are shown to be judged by their reproductive worth, by their purity, by their looks and by their use to men. The story isn’t chilling and heartbreaking because this is something we can look forward to if the religious right were to achieve ascendancy: it is chilling because this is what we do every day in so many little and not-so-little way in the society we live in now.

In reading it I feel like I came to a more full realization of the weight of the difficulties of being a woman.

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I have liked Brandon Sanderson since his first book was published, his detailed worlds, original magic systems, and the way he weaves his magic and character development so firmly into the world in fantastic stories. Mistborn is one of the best series I have read in recent times, Elantris was fantastic, and Warbreaker was wonderfully epic. I love the way he consistently turns the genre on its head. And now, after working on completing Robert Jordan’s (nothing if not genre conventional) Wheel of Time series, Sanderson turns in the first volume of his own vast world spanning fantasy epic.

And it is good.

His writing is crisp and clear, not overly flowery but it reads really smoothly. The language subtly reflects the character of the viewpoint characters as well as the world and culture of the story, most notably Sanderson manages to really capture the flavor in the passages he quotes from the titular fictional book “the Way of Kings”. The characters themselves are well rounded, motivated by subtle shades of their pasts and they act in real and surprising ways. They each have their own secrets, their own past and motivations as well as complex morals and personal struggles.The way that character back-story is woven into the main narrative is masterfully handled and finely paced, trickling out the details throughout the narrative so we learn their motivations for their present actions just as they become necessary, in whole it makes the characters exceptionally deep and engaging.

The structure of the novel itself is somewhat original in that it is broken up into discrete sections called “books” with each “book” dedicated to the stories of 2-4 of the 4 primary viewpoint characters which are themselves participating in three separate story arcs that take place in different locations and slowly connect into a masterfully epic plot. Between each of these “books” are Interludes, consisting of character vignettes that take place in other parts of the world, with other characters, one of which runs parallel to the main story and builds in a way that makes it clearly part of the overarching plot of the series that this book establishes. Each of these little vignettes gives details to some part of the world, or other characters, or the overarching plot. Despite the number of viewpoint characters and the distance of the interludes to the main story, unlike many other epic fantasy works I have read that had different viewpoint characters (such as Wheel of Time) this book managed to balance the viewpoints and make each character engaging enough that I did not ever feel frustrated by the viewpoint switch.

The world itself and the magic is original while at the same time playing with some recognizable tropes. Yes we are in a medieval-ish society (with access to relics of long lost magic) that is organized into a feudal system, but the world itself has been shaped by the Highstorms, magically powerful storms that sweep across the land, and the detail of the adaptations of the world, and society to these storms is just fascinating. Every detail seems to have been thought out, from the political system, the history, the storms, the magic and how it all comes together. The magic actually has a cost (in stormlight, or gemstones infused with stormlight as the case may be) and the economic implications of practical gemstones is even taken into consideration, emeralds become the most valuable because they can be used to transmute stone into organic material and even food, and this makes is easy for a well funded army to travel far beyond their supply lines. Everything comes together in the story.

While the novel balances viewpoints, character backgrounds, and world-building it is at the same time playing out scenes of well paced action alongside deep character interactions, secretive political intrigues, and some startlingly deep philosophical discussions. This is not only an epic tale, but it also serves as a practical exploration of leadership; discussing the use of law and order, morality of justice, and what right men have to lead others. And it isn’t just a surface discussion, it raises some very deep points.

All together it is a massive, detailed and well-written work that comes together in an climax. And even at 1000 pages and a self-sufficient story in its own right it feels like it is a wonderful epic prologue setting up an even wider story, and it left me wanting the rest. The Way of Kings reminds me of the Wheel of Time in some ways, but it is certainly better then any individual work of that series, more finely crafted, more original and more insightful. It also made me think at times of Dune, and I found that it compared favorably even there, the character development was more personal, and the scope even larger.

The one concern I have stems from the revelation that the “almighty creator” was just a fallible man and the hints of dualism underpinning the cosmology. But I can’t fully judge the cosmology until it has been more fully revealed.