K-SCORE: 79
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Altered Carbon is a heavy noir cyberpunk science fiction novel. Really hard sci-fi. Probably the most intensely sciencey thing I’ve read since Watt’s Blindsight. Richard K. Morgan’s main premise is that the crux of the human mind and soul can be digitally stored either in bodies in something called the cortical stack or in virtual formats - cyber realities so to speak. This alone is a hefty enough premise for an author to try to wield, and could have been explored endlessly. Alone the digitally stored mind idea could have created complex conflicts, but like other stories in the cyberpunk tradition, Altered Carbon piles onto this main idea dozens of other vital concepts. The novel is populated with artificial intelligences, synthetic bodies, cloned humans interacting with particle blasters, gravity harnesses, autocabs, and all manners of crazy drugs and viruses. The good: Morgan did a ton of planning, research, and detailing on all of these elements, none more so than the digital minds and sleeves. The bad: it’s at times hard to envision how all of these elements interact and coexist. Just following the potential actions of the protagonist and other characters is tricky, and that’s vital to appreciating the story’s twists and turns.
“people wear around each other’s bodies”
Any time the dark hero (and first-person narrator), Takeshi discusses the aftereffects of human society having determined how to cheat death, I was fully engaged. I was interested in the Meths, the wealthy who could afford digital backups of their minds and consequently rule for centuries, developing superiority complexes just from being far older than everyone else. I liked the digital prison idea and people’s desires and ability to enter computer programs to fulfill all kinds of needs. I especially liked the concept that people wear around each other’s bodies, feeling betrayed and confused, and at times liberated, by being in the skin of another who may or may not be the same age, sex, body-type, or race of his or her original body. People who might have had a smoking habit and therefore a nicotine addiction, or people who have neural enhancements or a chemical attraction to another person. The possibilities for the concept of skin-changing bodies (worn as “sleeves”) is both awesome and interesting, has tons of potential, and is well-explored by Morgan. He plays with these things a lot and in ways that are meaningful to the central story and characters. I loved Takeshi, born a man, in a man’s body, briefly entering a woman’s body and saying that for men, “your skin is like armor,” but for women, “it’s an organ to feel.” He’s giving insight into something his tech could answer that we can’t really know. And that’s the principle point. What things are dictated by the body and what by the mind and how can the link between those things be tweaked, strengthened, or broken down? What’s it like to walk around in someone else’s shoes? It’s a question as old as any, yet Morgan created a story in his debut novel where he could give it some literal answers, and consequently they are impactful. He can mix and match personality types with body-types as a result of his sci-fi idea, find men and women with creepy personalities, or violent ones, or helpless ones, and put them in the skins of the strong, the weak, the ugly, the beautiful, the broken.
“Often Takeshi would encounter someone and have a revelation and all I could do was think, “who?” or “what was that again?” and then start flipping to old chapters to see if I could dredge up the answers.”
A really great initial premise can only take a writer so far. Takeshi is a good character, and so are some of the others, but Morgan has so many characters and so much history and so many connections between them that many important ones don’t get enough page-time to shine and others become archetypal, blurred, or meaningless. Worse, big plot points and twists rely on a reader memory of characters briefly mentioned or seen in passing hundreds of pages back that is unlikely at best. Often Takeshi would encounter someone and have a revelation and all I could do was think, “who?” or “what was that again?” and then start flipping to old chapters to see if I could dredge up the answers. I don’t need my hand held to understand even an enormously complex plot, but Morgan needed more than a casual tangential comment from Takeshi to get me to know about or care about certain people and concepts. The stronger a foundation for a twist, the more impactful it will be. Of course with that foundation comes an ease of predicting that twist too. It’s a tough balance to find. Morgan goes with impossible to predict twists that have next to no impact. I had no clue who Reileen Kawahara was before she’s revealed to be the ultimate antagonist, and similarly, I couldn’t appreciate the plight of the Elliot family given that their backstory is mentioned briefly on page 70 and only used to motivate a character to do something for Takeshi on page 450.
Many of the subordinate technologies Morgan dreamt up are fun and decently well fleshed out, but mostly they’re just there to up the excitement level of Takeshi’s journey. Morgan invented a gravity harness so that he could have Takeshi flying through the clouds to a floating airship whorehouse; he invented tetrameth so he could have crazy futuristic drug trips; he invented spider venom spray guns so he could have Takeshi go weapon shopping to annihilate rooms of guards in fantastical ways. That’s cool, but it doesn’t always mean a specific creation is flawlessly integrated into the worlds. He didn’t reconceive his world based on the fact that cortical-stack frying laser beams had been invented, evolved, and been integrated into the criminal underworld. He just shoved the laser beams into the hands of the characters. It’s fun though.
On the shoving-it-into-there theme, the story is packed with big iconic noir sci-fi moments that are grisly, sexy, explosive, and enjoyable, but rarely feel seamlessly integrated into the central conflict. Morgan just wanted a humiliation underground fist-fight so wrote one and grafted it on his plot somewhere. He did the same with a shootout at a torture clinic and a passionate love scene on a yacht.
As the narrative progresses, you don’t really mind that such content is forced in place though, because the primary conflict involves an investigation that is not tied to the altered carbon technology but is rather a murder mystery of an old man who is still alive because he had a digital backup and a warehouse of clone bodies. You don’t mind, because you don’t care about that primary conflict. Oh, the tragedy of this wealthy dude having lost a few days of his memories! Not so much. You know as you read that inevitably Takeshi is going to figure out everything he was hired to figure out, and you’re likely not going to understand one bit of it until you get there, so you just hope it’s thrilling along the way. Which it is, but not that impactful. The detective plot doesn’t serve the cyberpunk much or vice versa, and Takeshi’s talents as a protagonist are twofold: his ability to have little remorse when he burns people’s faces off and his desire to stick with low-stakes mysteries to the bitter end.
Altered Carbon is the kind of novel that makes me excited for future entries in the same universe. The world-building quality is really high and the characters are pretty good, but the details of the plot are simply unimpressive. Pick a new site and go at it with the same building blocks. Focus on the mortar, Morgan, and you could do wonders just utilizing the big ideas you’ve already laid a foundation for.