[ESSAY] Humanity in Altered Carbon
If I told you there was a book out there that had a cyborg ninja running around solving murders and romancing the local police lieutenant, what would you say? I'll answer my own question with a question - "Where can I find such a gem?"
Okay, okay, I really like cyborgs, ninjas, police lieutenants, murders, and romance. So all my boxes are checked. But I also really like my surprises. By surprise, I mean that I like it when my expectations are subverted, if done well. Look at it this way - is a story really worth finishing if I already figured out the ending? I've already done the work, so what's the point in finishing the book? Subvert my expectations, keep me guessing. I want to want to finish a book because I honestly can't find the ending on my own.
What sets Altered Carbon apart is that the things that are surprising aren't necessarily because of what happens in the book, per se. If I made a timeline of all the events that happened in the book, I don't think that any particular item on that list would be surprising in context to the story. In fact, I'd say that many of the events seem inevitable, like watching an avalanche approach. You can see it coming, hear it coming, feel it coming, but there's nothing for you to do but stand there and take it. The surprise is all in the way the characters think and feel, and how they are motivated. To extend the metaphor, it's like if the avalanche hit you and you realize, the entire time you're being tossed around getting your bones broken, the only thing you can think about is if you turned off the oven at home. Listen, all I'm trying to say is that Altered Carbon is an excellently crafted story, and I'll be damned if I let you walk out of here without at least an ounce of appreciation for the book. Hell, even Netflix's adaptation has drawn positive criticism too. And while I do think that the show has its flaws, I can also see why it's been warmly received, mainly because of its kickass source material. So let's talk about it.
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan combines noir, hard-boiled fiction, and romance, set to a cyberpunk aesthetic that oozes sex, drugs, and EDM. Morgan certainly didn't pioneer the recipe for this concoction, but there's a refinement he brings to the melding of genre in his debut novel.
The book is set in the twenty-fifth century when humanity has mastered intergalactic travel. Yet the scope and expansiveness of humanity is left by the wayside due to the books tight and intimate focus; being a murder mystery, the meat of the plot comes from character. There are no explicit intergalactic space battles, no giant wars, no dark lords to overthrow, no sweeping changes to regimes or governments, no threat that touches the fate of humanity at large. These conflicts do exist in the book's mythology but are peripheral; they are never the central focus, serving only to provide world building and context to the events of the present.
In tandem with intergalactic travel, humanity has also developed immortality, or at least a technological shadow of it. Each person at birth has a computer chip, known as a "stack", inserted into the top of their spine that serves as a digital backup of their brain so that upon the death of the body, their stack may be transferred to a different body known as a "sleeve". While the rich may be able to afford dozens of premium sleeves over just as many lifetimes, the poor are stored in digital databases upon the death of their sleeve and are only able to inhabit other sleeves of varying levels of quality and synthetic fabrication when occasion or necessity arises.
The book follows Takeshi Kovacs the Envoy. Being an Envoy means that he is part of an elite group of people trained and conditioned to absorb and recall information at a superhuman level so as to assimilate into any given local population, adapt to any culture, learn almost any piece of technology, and befriend or interrogate or kill anyone. He is trained to wield his mind to be the most effective soldier possible in an age where physical enhancement and augmentation is more an issue of price than it is of training and effort. And being a foreigner to Earth, his lack of any connections makes him the perfect candidate to be the private detective investigating the attempted murder of the richest man on Earth, Laurens Bancroft.
As the richest man on Earth, Bancroft can afford nearly impenetrable security for his person and his family. Not only that, his stack is copied and stored in a separate and secure location every forty-eight hours. Yet his body was found in his own home office with his head blown clean off by a laser gun. Since then, the most recent update of his stack has been loaded onto a clone of his sleeve. What makes the case so intriguing is that nearly everyone thinks that Bancroft attempted suicide, and it is true that all signs point in that direction. The murder weapon is his own, locked behind a DNA coded safe that is only accessible to him and his wife, in which he has utter confidence to not be suspected. Furthermore, on the night of his death, he chose to take a confidential taxi service to a location two kilometers away from home only to walk those two remaining kilometers to his final resting place in his own office. But all of this flies in the face of his own guarantee ensuring that this is not a simple suicide case - "I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now." The promise of a man with the brutal intelligence and willpower to amass a multi-generational, galaxy spanning empire. Goddamn.
From there, the story folds into a labyrinth of intrigue where each seemingly disparate conflict loops back on each other. The effect can be dizzying. Often times characters or events will fly by the reader without adequate explanation. I do feel that Morgan doesn't dedicate enough time for exposition, but when he does, he simultaneously advances plot or characterization. The relationships between Bancroft, Bancroft's wife Miriam, Kovacs, the police lieutenant Kristin Ortega, other Envoy members, and even Kovacs' sleeve Elias Ryker, all contribute to the Bancroft case as well as to a larger underpinning conspiracy that centers around Kovacs and his past. Although all of these moving parts can be confusing and the reader may sometimes feel in over their head by the sheer amount of information, there is little to no fat to the narrative. Morgan's focus lends itself to the tightness of his prose, and all of this culminates in a subtly written yet explosive conclusion.
What really spoke to me in Altered Carbon was two things. The first was the characterization. Reread those lines by Bancroft to see what I mean, and I'd like to draw special attention to the particular phrase, "I would not have bungled it in this fashion." Even when planning his own hypothetical death, he has utter confidence in himself to execute perfectly and without hesitation. You don't see that every day. My point is that this type of hard hitting characterization is not a fluke but is seen in nearly all his characters.
The second thing that spoke to me was each character's code of ethics and how that reflects on the wider world.
Something that Morgan touches on but doesn't fully explore is how the lines are blurred between the synthetic stack and the biological brain. The human brain, the actual meat organ, is the seat of the mind. It is the physical equivalent to who and what we are - we are the tangle of synapses and neural connections built over our lifetimes. Just by inserting a stack into a body, the mind of the sleeve does not simply disappear. But the reader is given no perspective from the sleeve. What is even subtly darker is that sleeves can be outfitted with Pavlovian training, instinctual memories of past pheromonal triggers in intimate relationships, muscle memory, and more. These are things that would most likely have been accrued through living an actual life before being used as a shell, unless technology has advanced far enough that these things can be written in to a brain without needing to actually experience them in the first place, but I think the distinction is a moot point. Often times, while most people have a lock on these instincts, over stimulation and new environments will trigger these responses automatically.
So, where does the biological mind go? What are its experiences when being subjugated by the synthetic mind? Is it even lucid while the synthetic mind walks around in the stolen body? Who were these people in their past lives? How much consent was given as to what they would become or to whom they would be host? Did society create a new form of slavery so complete and inescapable that they had forgotten that the bodies are even human at all? I found this line of questioning to be incredibly thought provoking. Although Morgan doesn't answer these questions in full, he does go on to examine a more fundamental question as the story progresses - what is the definition and worth of a human being?
The issue becomes complicated especially when the people you know, potentially people you love, can radically change their physical form. It's not only an issue of changing one's appearance. Form shapes identity, and identity shapes form. Manners, conduct, sexuality, and even morals are tied to the body we wear, and in a world where you can change your body for the right price, this fluidity begs the question of where we draw the line between what is physically and metaphysically human. As an example, what are the repercussions of a man bringing his wife home when she is in a different body? Or when a grandmother celebrates Cinco de Mayo with her family in the body of a male convict? (This last example is played out in the Netflix adaptation and is incredibly well acted.)
[Detour by disclaimer: When I mentioned sexuality and the interplay between form and identity, it is not my intention to assert that it is immoral to alter one's form or identity. What I am driving at is that this debate veers closely to issues that the LGBTQIA community has to tackle on a daily basis. To be perfectly clear, I support the community and advocate that gender change therapy/surgery falls within the bounds of basic healthcare and therefore should be universally accessible. I only want to make the distinction that the debate in the book is slightly different from the ongoing real world debate. The main difference I want to highlight is that in the book, sleeve change is not always consensual and is locked behind a paywall. People are sometimes forced by circumstance to take sleeves with poor health or a different gender or ethnicity, and these are all factors in how we interact with our loved ones, our community, and ourselves. Both the issue in the book and in the real world are about body autonomy, yet they come at the issue at different angles.]
We're seeing this social mechanic play out even now in the Internet Age, where we can make deep friendships with people that we've never met or seen. It's true that physicality and tangibility are core to human relationships, yet how much of what we value in another person is in knowing that they are real and there? To be there for someone doesn't simply mean to be physically present, and yet when we truly love someone, it is impossible to be separated from that person. This is the push and pull of how we value the mind versus the body of an individual.
I don't want to give away too much in terms of how Morgan goes about answering this question of humanity. To do so would be a disservice not only to the philosophical but also emotional depth and sensitivity with which he tackles the subject matter. I will say that what conspires between his characters, specifically between Kovacs and Ortega, is heartfelt and that their relationship, the inevitable avalanche, serves as a thematic focal point.
I think the main thing that I look for in fiction is that there has to be a measure of hope in the work. I'd like for a moment to strip the word "hope" of its cloying connotation. I don't mean that by having hope, I believe everything will be alright. What I do think is that hope is the attitude we maintain in spite of the terrible shit we go through, that we have the ability to fight for something better. So, I don't need a happy ending or a sad ending; the exact flavor of the ending doesn't mean nearly as much as how we got to the end and whether or not it imparts a sense of hope. Case in point, take George Orwell's 1984. Definitely no happy endings there. But I still think it's a damn good book. The commentary the book provides is a means for hope, that despite the bleakness of the future, we have to fight for a better one, and it begins with naming the darkness. This is what I believe Altered Carbon provides, hope for our ability to make a better tomorrow. We might not get it right the first time, but the point is that we never gave up on trying. Or at the very least, if we did give up, we never tried to make it worse. It is something that strikes deeply at who we are as humans. And isn't that the point of art? To tell stories about ourselves, to learn and theorize about what it means to be human? In this way, I do find that Altered Carbon provides that to the reader. Which has got to count for something.
Okay, okay, I really like cyborgs, ninjas, police lieutenants, murders, and romance. So all my boxes are checked. But I also really like my surprises. By surprise, I mean that I like it when my expectations are subverted, if done well. Look at it this way - is a story really worth finishing if I already figured out the ending? I've already done the work, so what's the point in finishing the book? Subvert my expectations, keep me guessing. I want to want to finish a book because I honestly can't find the ending on my own.
What sets Altered Carbon apart is that the things that are surprising aren't necessarily because of what happens in the book, per se. If I made a timeline of all the events that happened in the book, I don't think that any particular item on that list would be surprising in context to the story. In fact, I'd say that many of the events seem inevitable, like watching an avalanche approach. You can see it coming, hear it coming, feel it coming, but there's nothing for you to do but stand there and take it. The surprise is all in the way the characters think and feel, and how they are motivated. To extend the metaphor, it's like if the avalanche hit you and you realize, the entire time you're being tossed around getting your bones broken, the only thing you can think about is if you turned off the oven at home. Listen, all I'm trying to say is that Altered Carbon is an excellently crafted story, and I'll be damned if I let you walk out of here without at least an ounce of appreciation for the book. Hell, even Netflix's adaptation has drawn positive criticism too. And while I do think that the show has its flaws, I can also see why it's been warmly received, mainly because of its kickass source material. So let's talk about it.
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan combines noir, hard-boiled fiction, and romance, set to a cyberpunk aesthetic that oozes sex, drugs, and EDM. Morgan certainly didn't pioneer the recipe for this concoction, but there's a refinement he brings to the melding of genre in his debut novel.
The book is set in the twenty-fifth century when humanity has mastered intergalactic travel. Yet the scope and expansiveness of humanity is left by the wayside due to the books tight and intimate focus; being a murder mystery, the meat of the plot comes from character. There are no explicit intergalactic space battles, no giant wars, no dark lords to overthrow, no sweeping changes to regimes or governments, no threat that touches the fate of humanity at large. These conflicts do exist in the book's mythology but are peripheral; they are never the central focus, serving only to provide world building and context to the events of the present.
In tandem with intergalactic travel, humanity has also developed immortality, or at least a technological shadow of it. Each person at birth has a computer chip, known as a "stack", inserted into the top of their spine that serves as a digital backup of their brain so that upon the death of the body, their stack may be transferred to a different body known as a "sleeve". While the rich may be able to afford dozens of premium sleeves over just as many lifetimes, the poor are stored in digital databases upon the death of their sleeve and are only able to inhabit other sleeves of varying levels of quality and synthetic fabrication when occasion or necessity arises.
The book follows Takeshi Kovacs the Envoy. Being an Envoy means that he is part of an elite group of people trained and conditioned to absorb and recall information at a superhuman level so as to assimilate into any given local population, adapt to any culture, learn almost any piece of technology, and befriend or interrogate or kill anyone. He is trained to wield his mind to be the most effective soldier possible in an age where physical enhancement and augmentation is more an issue of price than it is of training and effort. And being a foreigner to Earth, his lack of any connections makes him the perfect candidate to be the private detective investigating the attempted murder of the richest man on Earth, Laurens Bancroft.
As the richest man on Earth, Bancroft can afford nearly impenetrable security for his person and his family. Not only that, his stack is copied and stored in a separate and secure location every forty-eight hours. Yet his body was found in his own home office with his head blown clean off by a laser gun. Since then, the most recent update of his stack has been loaded onto a clone of his sleeve. What makes the case so intriguing is that nearly everyone thinks that Bancroft attempted suicide, and it is true that all signs point in that direction. The murder weapon is his own, locked behind a DNA coded safe that is only accessible to him and his wife, in which he has utter confidence to not be suspected. Furthermore, on the night of his death, he chose to take a confidential taxi service to a location two kilometers away from home only to walk those two remaining kilometers to his final resting place in his own office. But all of this flies in the face of his own guarantee ensuring that this is not a simple suicide case - "I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now." The promise of a man with the brutal intelligence and willpower to amass a multi-generational, galaxy spanning empire. Goddamn.
From there, the story folds into a labyrinth of intrigue where each seemingly disparate conflict loops back on each other. The effect can be dizzying. Often times characters or events will fly by the reader without adequate explanation. I do feel that Morgan doesn't dedicate enough time for exposition, but when he does, he simultaneously advances plot or characterization. The relationships between Bancroft, Bancroft's wife Miriam, Kovacs, the police lieutenant Kristin Ortega, other Envoy members, and even Kovacs' sleeve Elias Ryker, all contribute to the Bancroft case as well as to a larger underpinning conspiracy that centers around Kovacs and his past. Although all of these moving parts can be confusing and the reader may sometimes feel in over their head by the sheer amount of information, there is little to no fat to the narrative. Morgan's focus lends itself to the tightness of his prose, and all of this culminates in a subtly written yet explosive conclusion.
What really spoke to me in Altered Carbon was two things. The first was the characterization. Reread those lines by Bancroft to see what I mean, and I'd like to draw special attention to the particular phrase, "I would not have bungled it in this fashion." Even when planning his own hypothetical death, he has utter confidence in himself to execute perfectly and without hesitation. You don't see that every day. My point is that this type of hard hitting characterization is not a fluke but is seen in nearly all his characters.
The second thing that spoke to me was each character's code of ethics and how that reflects on the wider world.
Something that Morgan touches on but doesn't fully explore is how the lines are blurred between the synthetic stack and the biological brain. The human brain, the actual meat organ, is the seat of the mind. It is the physical equivalent to who and what we are - we are the tangle of synapses and neural connections built over our lifetimes. Just by inserting a stack into a body, the mind of the sleeve does not simply disappear. But the reader is given no perspective from the sleeve. What is even subtly darker is that sleeves can be outfitted with Pavlovian training, instinctual memories of past pheromonal triggers in intimate relationships, muscle memory, and more. These are things that would most likely have been accrued through living an actual life before being used as a shell, unless technology has advanced far enough that these things can be written in to a brain without needing to actually experience them in the first place, but I think the distinction is a moot point. Often times, while most people have a lock on these instincts, over stimulation and new environments will trigger these responses automatically.
So, where does the biological mind go? What are its experiences when being subjugated by the synthetic mind? Is it even lucid while the synthetic mind walks around in the stolen body? Who were these people in their past lives? How much consent was given as to what they would become or to whom they would be host? Did society create a new form of slavery so complete and inescapable that they had forgotten that the bodies are even human at all? I found this line of questioning to be incredibly thought provoking. Although Morgan doesn't answer these questions in full, he does go on to examine a more fundamental question as the story progresses - what is the definition and worth of a human being?
The issue becomes complicated especially when the people you know, potentially people you love, can radically change their physical form. It's not only an issue of changing one's appearance. Form shapes identity, and identity shapes form. Manners, conduct, sexuality, and even morals are tied to the body we wear, and in a world where you can change your body for the right price, this fluidity begs the question of where we draw the line between what is physically and metaphysically human. As an example, what are the repercussions of a man bringing his wife home when she is in a different body? Or when a grandmother celebrates Cinco de Mayo with her family in the body of a male convict? (This last example is played out in the Netflix adaptation and is incredibly well acted.)
[Detour by disclaimer: When I mentioned sexuality and the interplay between form and identity, it is not my intention to assert that it is immoral to alter one's form or identity. What I am driving at is that this debate veers closely to issues that the LGBTQIA community has to tackle on a daily basis. To be perfectly clear, I support the community and advocate that gender change therapy/surgery falls within the bounds of basic healthcare and therefore should be universally accessible. I only want to make the distinction that the debate in the book is slightly different from the ongoing real world debate. The main difference I want to highlight is that in the book, sleeve change is not always consensual and is locked behind a paywall. People are sometimes forced by circumstance to take sleeves with poor health or a different gender or ethnicity, and these are all factors in how we interact with our loved ones, our community, and ourselves. Both the issue in the book and in the real world are about body autonomy, yet they come at the issue at different angles.]
We're seeing this social mechanic play out even now in the Internet Age, where we can make deep friendships with people that we've never met or seen. It's true that physicality and tangibility are core to human relationships, yet how much of what we value in another person is in knowing that they are real and there? To be there for someone doesn't simply mean to be physically present, and yet when we truly love someone, it is impossible to be separated from that person. This is the push and pull of how we value the mind versus the body of an individual.
I don't want to give away too much in terms of how Morgan goes about answering this question of humanity. To do so would be a disservice not only to the philosophical but also emotional depth and sensitivity with which he tackles the subject matter. I will say that what conspires between his characters, specifically between Kovacs and Ortega, is heartfelt and that their relationship, the inevitable avalanche, serves as a thematic focal point.
I think the main thing that I look for in fiction is that there has to be a measure of hope in the work. I'd like for a moment to strip the word "hope" of its cloying connotation. I don't mean that by having hope, I believe everything will be alright. What I do think is that hope is the attitude we maintain in spite of the terrible shit we go through, that we have the ability to fight for something better. So, I don't need a happy ending or a sad ending; the exact flavor of the ending doesn't mean nearly as much as how we got to the end and whether or not it imparts a sense of hope. Case in point, take George Orwell's 1984. Definitely no happy endings there. But I still think it's a damn good book. The commentary the book provides is a means for hope, that despite the bleakness of the future, we have to fight for a better one, and it begins with naming the darkness. This is what I believe Altered Carbon provides, hope for our ability to make a better tomorrow. We might not get it right the first time, but the point is that we never gave up on trying. Or at the very least, if we did give up, we never tried to make it worse. It is something that strikes deeply at who we are as humans. And isn't that the point of art? To tell stories about ourselves, to learn and theorize about what it means to be human? In this way, I do find that Altered Carbon provides that to the reader. Which has got to count for something.
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