Altered Carbon

Richard Morgan's cyberpunk novel, Altered Carbon, turned out to be about as great as its Netflix adaptation. Or at least the first season of the show was much to my liking: I have not seen the second yet. In my opinion the show is one of the better ones Netflix has produced. I do wonder though how the second season is: the novel and its sequels are somewhat challenging to adapt for television because the characters tend to switch bodies. Claiming two people are the same person is difficult to believe when you don't have access to their thoughts like you do in a book. How well does the continuity work when the main character is played by a completely different actor.

In Altered Carbon, humankind has essentially achieved immortality. To what degree depends on the person: how wealthy they are or what kind of connections they have. Meths [Methuselah], the filthy rich, for instance, have their consciousness backed up offsite almost daily and are technically safe even if their body perishes and -- most crucially -- its consciousness-saving cortical stack is destroyed. If such an event were to happen, the backup is just uploaded into a new body -- or sleeve, as they're called -- and the person is back in business with only lacking memories of the past day or so.

An artificially produced body with all manner of optional extra features can be acquired (with enough currency) but a more common practice is using a your more-or-less standard human sleeve.

Mind deteriorates when a body starts getting old. Since getting a new sleeve is costly, some (or most?) just get their implants stashed somewhere indefinitely when the time comes. Friends and relatives can then visit them in virtual reality.

I find it implausible that a mind is able to control a different body at all. As a concept it is definitely way out there. Even in the novel it is not a seamless transition though. The protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is not a stranger to being re-sleeved but still has to fight existential crisis about every time he looks in the mirror. The novel explores the idea of body-switching with different scenarios, but I think it has a pretty clear stance on that a person is their consciousness: body is just a vessel for traversing the physical reality.

A technology called needlecasting allows a consciousness to be transferred over immense distances almost instantaneously. With it people can quickly "travel" to colonized star systems that take hundreds of years to reach with mundane means.

With the digitization of consciousness comes the possibility of copying oneself into many bodies. Unsurprisingly such so-called double sleeving has been made highly illegal in the novel. I'd imagine it having too many ethical, moral, and practical dilemmas led it to be simpler to just disallow the practice completely. In the case of an accidental double sleeving, the subject can choose which consciousness continues existing and which one's memories are merged if at all. Kovacs gets to experience what that is like. Kovacs and Kovacs are rather calm about the idea of one of them getting ended though. Then again, he is not your common guy.

Takeshi Kovacs is a former envoy, a U.N. elite soldier. What that exactly means didn't come across as well in the show as it did in the book. Viewer gets an outside perspective like the other characters who jokingly say that maybe they should join the special forces too and Kovacs is thinking like no, you don't understand what it means. The importance of his psychological training and mental techniques isn't as clear.

In the prologue Kovacs and his partner are living a life of crime as is common for retired envoys. They are killed by U.N. commandos in Harlan's World colony and face a long stack storage sentence. Instead Kovacs finds himself soon re-sleeved on Earth. Laurens Bancroft, a Meth, has hired him to investigate why Bancroft's previous sleeve was found dead, allegedly having shot himself and his cortical stack.

I remember when watching the Netflix show that I got irrationally disappointed how Bancroft didn't get to know what had actually happened. Another Meth called Reileen Kawahara, whom Kovacs knows personally, is involved and extorts Kovacs to not solve the case by threatening to end his still stack-stored partner. Kovacs stages a believable conclusion for Bancroft and goes after Kawahara. Kovacs does discover what exactly happened to Bancroft's sleeve in the process but even now after having read the book too I have already forgotten what it was.

Altered Carbon begins as a detective novel but then derails into a revenge story against a villain whose relationship with Kovacs is almost like something that happened in a non-existent previous novel. I enjoyed the ride but I wasn't cheering for Kovacs's attempt to get to Kawahara -- I felt indifferent.

If The Lost Fleet was lacking in world building, Altered Carbon has it in spades. There's a huge amount of detail scattered throughout the novel about its culture. There's even a made-up philosopher whom Kovacs likes quoting.

A small difference between the novel and the show is the AI hotel Kovacs lodges in. The Raven and its Edgar Allan Poe avatar were my favorite thing in the show but in the novel the hotel is called The Hendrix and the AI takes the form of Jimi (though his first name is not mentioned, just his appearance). Hendrix's estate opposed the idea of depicting him in a violent context of the Netflix show and thus the hotel became what it did -- thankfully so.

Also, I usually mention translators by name when there's something wrong but this time it's the opposite. Einari Aaltonen did brilliant work. Not even once did I stop to think what something was called in the original: everything was translated so gracefully into Finnish.