07 February 2018

Books: Altered Carbon By Richard K. Morgan (2002)




Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan features a lot of the basic aspects of cyberpunk (a category of writing born out the 1960s and 70s drug and sexual revolution culture, but it wasn’t until William Gibson’s 1984 debut novel Neuromancer that the actual word was coined and entered into our lexicon), which is a subgenre of science fiction that has rather large, if not super obvious following. These tales all have futuristic settings (this one set 500 years from now) that combine highly advanced technology with some sort of radical shift in the basic social structure of Earth and beyond. What the genre is known for is disrupting the typical tropes of science fiction, with its sometimes utopian views, focusing more on how technology and drugs become intertwined, and where the punk subculture is basically no longer a subculture. For most people, it’s the 1982 film Blade Runner that introduced the broad based audience to these concepts that began with writers like Philip K. Dick (who’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep was the basis for Ridley Scott’s ambitious Blade Runner film), J.G. Ballard, Roger Zelazny, and Harlan Ellison some two decades earlier. But like all science fiction, which are metaphors for today’s problems, the meat of the plots are built around old-style murder mysteries and the dark and grimy noir films Hollywood put out in the 1940s and 50s.
 
In this cyberpunk future, humans have developed a piece of technology called a “stack”, where their consciousness now resides. These devices, near the base of the back neck, continuously updates, recording everything a person experiences. Bodies have now become “sleeves” which allows people to swap out aging or dying forms for a new one, just insert your consciousness so you can potentially live forever. Well, if you’re rich. So yes, as it seems typical in most science fiction novels, only the super rich can do this.
 
Anyways, “onetime U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Resleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.”

For the most part, I found the concepts interesting, but on the whole, the book was disturbing. As I said, this novel clearly owes a debt to Dick and his classic novel that became Blade Runner (and the author does sort of acknowledge this by having Kovacs' consciousness stored off off Earth on Harlan's World)   but I was troubled by the ultra-violence and cruelty, and the hatefulness of the world created by the author. It kept me distant, I guess, as I found it impossible to get emotionally invested Kovacs, or really care about the story as it unwound (though Ortega proves the most human). Clearly, I would not survive in a world such as this.

Maybe this is why I’ve always found fantasy novels more interesting (even as I’ve grown weary of the genre) because it was clear who was good or who was bad. In Altered Carbon, the villains are not really evil per se -they’re just doing appalling things in pursuant of their goals so even as they meet their terrible end, I found no satisfaction with it. And the acceptance of easy violence, the cheapness in which life is taken (in the goriest of ways) has bothered me more over the years than it ever has. Growing older, seeing the winds of time take things I love and like away, this book revealed to me that maybe this of subgenre of science fiction is not for me. 

I guess space operas are what I like.

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