I recently finished reading Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. I’d heard a bit about this book in the past; it had made a pretty big splash for a debut novel, but I hadn’t read it. It arrived a few weeks ago in the CARE package of books my uncle Eric sent to me, and after making it to the top of the pile, I finally got to read it. It was an excellent book, reminding me of a cross between a Raymond Chandler novel and the movie Blade Runner.
Altered Carbon — Richard K. Morgan
Rating: 4.5/5
Richard K. Morgan’s debut novel, Altered Carbon, is quite an achievement. Drawing freely from the tropes of film noir, detective fiction, and cyberpunk, Altered Carbon is not only a tight mystery with excellent pacing but also a deep exploration about what it really means to be a human individual.
In Morgan’s world, death has been robbed of most of its sting by the “stack”, a small cybernetic implant that sits at the base of the skull and digitally records a person’s thoughts and sense perceptions — in effect, the complete personality. In the event of a person’s physical death, the stack can be downloaded into another “sleeve” (body), overwriting the original personality and allowing the downloaded person to live again in the new sleeve.
Of course, human nature being what it is, this doesn’t necessarily lead to a golden age for mankind. Real death through destruction of the stack is still possible, unless you are rich enough to have yourself backed up regularly. Choice bodies are expensive, and unless you are wealthy or useful, providing for your own continued existence in anything other than a virtual condo or a cheap synthetic sleeve may be beyond your means. Virtual experiences mediated by computer software are widely available, but when you are in virtual space you are completely at the mercy of the host computer system and the subject to the whims of whomever controls it.
In Morgan’s setting, humanity has managed to lever itself off of Earth, with the help of an alien legacy discovered on Mars. FTL communications allow a sort of interstellar mobility for some people, as it is possible to transmit your coded personality to another planet for “ensleevement” there. Of course, this type of travel is prohibitively expensive and only available to the fantastically wealthy or to those people with exceptional skills that are employed by the fantastically wealthy.
The main character of Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs, is one of the latter. A former member of the Envoy Corps, the most elite miliary unit of the UN Protectorate, turned criminal, Kovacs is serving a long sentence in storage on the colony planet of Harlan’s World when he gets selected as an investigator for an exceptionally rich and influential man on Earth. Granted a new sleeve and a six-week lease on life, he is instructed to solve the mystery of how his patron, Laurens Bancroft, was killed. The police think the investigation is a waste of time. They’re sure it was suicide.
Any novel that deals with digitization and transfer of human consciousness has to be informed by some sort of materialistic assumptions. A belief that the mind arises solely from material causes is known as “materialistic monism”, and almost all novelists that deal with transhuman themes have to assume this in one way or another. Most, however, shy away from some of the more bizarre consequences of such a position, such as personality blending, editing, duplication and destruction, as well as the more basic issues of whether you are the same person in a 15-year-old girl’s body as you were when your mind was in the body of a 40-year-old male. Even some of the most cutting-edge, avant-garde transhumanist writers try to preserve distinct identities and mental images for their viewpoint characters, likely because it becomes very difficult to write about and identify with hive minds or entities with no fixed personality features.
Morgan does at least pay lip service to some of these issues — viruses that can perform destructive corruption of the personality feature in several places in the novel, and both editing and duplication are discussed at times. Also, he acknowledges the influence that the flesh has on the mind — romantic attraction between two personalities strongly depends on the pheromonal compatibility of the bodies they wear, and addictions to alcohol and tobacco are dependent on the habituations of the sleeve. Like most authors, however, Morgan shies away from some of the really tough questions about what this type of technology would mean for human individuality. He does this by legislating some applications (duplication) away, by not showing some of the other possibilities, and finally, by seeming to retreat to the position that the stack is the “house of the soul”, much like Descartes’ dualistic view of the pineal gland. The stack, fragile and corruptible as it is, becomes the fixed point of a person’s identity.
Morgan’s writing is pretty tight and clean, making a nice stylistic complement to the hardboiled characters and convoluted plot he serves up. He’s got a bit of everything in this novel: comedy, tragedy, greed, romance, idealism, sadism, mystery, and an illuminating and satisfying resolution. In terms of content, he reminds me favorably of Philip K. Dick, so it doesn’t surprise me that Hollywood has optioned this novel for a movie. A film version of Altered Carbon could be great if it was done with the same cinematographic sensibilities as Blade Runner. I’m certainly looking forward to reading more by Morgan in the future.
