Book review: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Today, I'm going to review the above mentioned book. It's actually part of a series of books called the Takeshi Kovacs Series and this is book 1. Also, I see from www.amazon.co.uk that this book has been made into a new Netflix series coming in Feb 2018. Wow! I wonder if it would be R-rated?
In my review, I'm going to look at three things. Since it is a science fiction book, I'll discuss a bit about the science since a major portion of the book is driven by the science and tech available. The second thing I'll discuss is the setting and society and how it has been affected by the tech. Lastly, I'll look at some of the little ironies that the book throws up because of the tech. I won't be going too much into the plot, the characters or any of that stuff. You can probably read most of this on amazon.com. I want to do a different review here based on the science and tech and how it is depicted and used in the book.
In Altered Carbon, the most important piece of technology is a little something called the cortical stack. The book itself is set in 25th century Earth. The cortical stack is a little storage device installed in a person's spinal column. It's used to digitize and store the person's memory. If the person dies, his or her cortical stack can be retrieved and the person revived in a new body with the old memories, up to the point of death. Think of the cortical stack as a hard drive of all your memories, compressed and digitally stored, ready to be played back. Apparently, according to the book, the cortical stack can only be installed after a certain age. Thus children who die are still dead since their memories cannot be retrieved.
At this stage, I can guess what's in your mind. You're thinking "Wow! Doesn't it mean that people are effectively immortal?" The answer is both yes and no. Yes, anyone can live forever if they can get a new body at the end of their life and download (the term used in the book is "resleeve") into the new body (also known as a "sleeve"). The book even mentions how people can buy an insurance policy that they pay off over a lifetime that guarantees that they will get a new body when they reach the limit on their original body. It seems that everybody, apart from the very young as stated above, is installed with a cortical stack. The catch here is that you'll have to literally grow old in your body before you can be resleeved. How would you like to live, grow old and die only to be resleeved again into a new body to do it all over again? Most ordinary people won't be able to stand it. So it's immortality with a price. After one or two lifetimes, most people would opt to go into cold storage. Their cortical stacks are removed and stored in some facility. They may be resleeved for some family reunions in the future but most of them would just be stored for eternity. Sounds like a digital version of the afterlife!
The societal implications of the cortical stack are staggering. Of course, the rich and powerful have ways and means around the limitations I mentioned above. One of the important characters in the book, besides Takeshi Kovacs himself, is Laurens Bancroft. Bancroft is a super rich long lived (effectively immortal) man (known in the novel as a meth, short for Methuselah) who owns a lot of businesses. He also has a wireless backup copy of his cortical stack that operates continuously. Imagine you have all of your memories backed up to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive. So even if your cortical stack was destroyed, you will still be alive because you can download your backup memories into a new sleeve. What's that? You lost your old body? No problem if you're Bancroft. He owns a cloning facility so he can easily resleeve into a brand new clone. How cool is that?
There are other effects of the cortical stack that the book discusses which I won't go into here. I do want to mention one other thing. It is possible to send a person's digitized memories through interstellar space through a process called needlecasting. This is the primary way to achieve interstellar travel. Of course, it means that someone must have travelled to the other planet through slower-than-light (STL) colony ships to establish a colony on a distant world. In fact, the novel starts on one such world called Harlan's World. That's where we meet our protagonist Takeshi Kovacs. In the opening scene, Takeshi was captured and forcibly needlecasted to Earth. He is then given an offer he can't refuse by Bancroft: Investigate Bancroft's murder and, if successful, Takeshi will get a new body and a million credits.
Now for the juicy part. Be warned. This section is more explicit and NSFW. I'll discuss some of the little ironies of the cortical stack. One of them, if you haven't guessed already, is sex. Since you can change bodies almost effortlessly, that means you can also have sex, in your new body, with anyone else in their body, original or otherwise. One of the minor characters is a hacker whom Takeshi managed to spring out of jail. Unfortunately, the hacker could not get back her old body so she had to use another female's body. The hacker goes back home, reunites with her husband and make love all night. The next morning, the hacker says that she felt like she was an adulterer because she made love to her husband in another woman's body!
The other irony is when Takeshi visits an underground fight club where trained martial artists are sleeved into sleek new bodies, custom made for fighting. These martial artists then fight against each other in a no holds barred tournament. Sort of like the Kumite in the movie Bloodsport (1998) starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. While Takeshi was there, he admired some of the sleek new bodies which he recognized. He could even recall the specs of the body, sort of like how we can admire a new mobile phone and recite its specs at will. Later in the novel, he had the opportunity to be sleeved into one of these bodies. However, due to various circumferences, he had to be drugged to bring down his body's metabolism. That means that he was effectively trapped in a shiny new body which he had drooled over previously. Talk about ironic!
Altered Carbon has a fair bit of violence, sex and drugs so if those things offend your sensibilities, you may want to give it a miss. If you're OK with those things, go ahead and read the book. It feels really futuristic and gets you thinking about the impact of technology on society. Sort of like how bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are changing our world right now as we live. There's even a pen and paper role-playing game (rpg) called Eclipse Phase that uses many of the same themes and vocabulary of Altered Carbon. If you're a lifelong technophile, you'll like this book.
That's it for now. If you've enjoyed reading this review and have any comments, additions etc., feel free to let me know. Any upvotes will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance!