Altered Carbon By Richard K Morgan

Altered Carbon

By Richard K Morgan

Richard Morgan was born in London in 1965, but grew up in the village of Hethersett near Norwich. He attended Queen's college, Cambridge where he studied history. By his own admission, he almost screwed up hard in his first year, following a grand tradition of college students across the globe (Editor: By way of being drunk on freedom and also literally drunk?). However he managed to pull himself together and gain his degree. He started teaching English after his graduation so he could travel the world, which he did for fourteen years.  He’s lived in Madrid and Istanbul and became a fluent Spanish speaker, he later took a post at the university of Strathclyde in Glasgow Scotland. He evolved from teaching English to teaching people how to teach English and it was at this point he remembered that he had wanted to be a writer. Of course like all British writers he holds an extremely negative view of governments and even society. Which leads me to ask my British readers: just what are you putting these people's water? Seriously between Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Charles Stross, and now Mr. Morgan, I'm starting to wonder how science fiction conventions in London don't turn into anarchist rebellions! I'll grant as an American, I'm throwing rocks from glass houses but you can see where I'm coming from! But that's not why we're here today. Today we're here to talk about Mr. Morgans first novel to be published, Altered Carbon.

Altered Carbon was published in February 2002 by Victor Gollanz Ltd, a British publishing company founded in 1926. After the death of its founder it was passed from owner to owner until turned into a science fiction and fantasy imprint by the current owners Cassell & Co and Orion Publishing Group. Altered Carbon made itself hard to ignore in many circles, sort of like a small tank that has parked itself where your living room used to be. Mr. Morgan was able to sell the film rights to the book to noted producer Joel Silver for a million dollars, which allowed him to transition to full time writer. In 2003 it won the Philip K Dick Award for Best Novel. The film fell through but Netflix, a company you may have heard of in passing, decided it would make a great series and released a 10 episode first season recently but I'll come back to that.

Let's start with the basics, Altered Carbon takes place at least 400 years from now. Humanity discovered a path to immortality with the invention of an implant called a cortical stack. Implanted at a young age in the brain stem, the cortical stack can house all of your memories and personality, if your current physical body (referred to as a sleeve) dies, your cortical stack can be implanted into a new body with all your thoughts, dreams, memories and personality entirely intact (this is called resleeving). Unfortunately, it seems that money talks here. Resleeving costs, and not everyone can afford it. So while the wealthy can plug themselves into body after body, normal folks often can't afford to resleeve themselves after their deaths. The wealthy who can live for centuries while profiting from the labor of entire generations of normal people are often referred to as Meths, which is short for Methuselahs. This is, as I think most of you know, a Biblical reference. For those of you who didn't get the benefit of Sunday school, Methuselah is a minor figure in the Old Testament, his biggest achievement being living 969 years before disappearing from the Earth. This isn't all that’s changed.  Humanity has also spread to the stars. While physical FTL remains impossible, with colony ships having to traverse the void in long slow voyages carrying their passengers on the stack, which is to say carrying them with their cortical stack removed from the body, communication can take place at Faster than light or close enough that it doesn't matter. The transmission of data at FTL gives humanity a method of FTL travel, simply beam the data on a cortical stack through the network to another cortical stack and plug it into a body on site and there you go. You have successfully traveled to another world, all you had to do was leave your body behind. Humanity has used these technologies to forge an interstellar empire in a 100 light year bubble centered on Earth run by the United Nations, referred to as the Protectorate. However what makes this important for us is that the story opens with our main character Takeshi Kovacs having been transmitted against his will to Earth from his home planet and planted in a new body for a single purpose.

A man has been murdered. This is less of a problem for the people of the Altered Carbon universe then it would be for us but it is still a problem. It's less of a problem because the victim, Laurens Bancroft is still alive. Due to his cortical stack he was promptly resleeved and to make things worse, he's a methuselah. A long lived, super wealthy, and powerful man. The police have ruled it a suicide. After all, he was shot in the face at point blank range with a pistol with only his prints on it, that was sitting in a safe that only he and his wife Miriam could access. His wife was investigated and questioned under truth detecting polygraphs but passed all of them with flying colors. Now one of the reasons Mr. Bancroft survived his murder was the fact that he has remote back ups.  At regular intervals his cortical stack is remotely scanned and copied to an off site location so if the cortical stack is destroyed, he can be brought back from one of the back ups into a tailor-made clone body. This is very expensive as you might imagine but Bancroft has beenhoarding massive amounts of money for over 300 years at this point so he can afford an expensive perk or 500. He's also paid for our main character Takeshi Kovacs to be beamed to Earth, plugged into a new sleeve and set forth to prove that Bancroft was murdered, find out who did it, and why they did it. Let's talk about Takeshi Kovacs now.

Takeshi was born on Harlan's World, a colony with a grand tradition of revolution against corrupt authority expressed in a system called Quellism. Despite the authorities being really unfond of that belief system Quellism remains popular among the underclasses. Takeshi was born into those underclasses, he joined the gangs that ran the lower class neighborhoods and after that joined the United Nations Protectorate Marine Corps. From there he joined the envoys. The United Nations Envoy Corps creates troops that are a combination of intelligence operative and special forces trooper using advanced technology and more importantly advanced training methods able to impact and shape the subconscious of the soldier in question. Among other things, every psychological barrier in a normal human mind to committing violent and killing is utterly removed. Honestly, speaking as someone with military service... What the hell are you people thinking? The idea isn't to create people who can go to violence at the drop of a hat but people who can go to violence in specific situations. You've removed the controls that militaries have been struggling to implement since the days of bronze you maniacs! This may be because Envoys are taught how to infiltrate foreign cultures and if necessary utterly destroy them so as to maintain United Nations authority. So they aren't traditional soldiers even if they can perform that role. Still if that wasn't bad enough they are trained to be able to adapt quickly to being resleeved and to exploit any body to its fullest ability. Takeshi was a good envoy but after leaving the Envoy Corps found himself drifting back into the criminal lifestyle and became a mercenary. This led to his capture and imprisonment and that led to Bancroft “hiring” him. Frankly this was inevitable given UN law that envoys cannot hold military or police positions after leaving the envoy corps, which is incredibly stupid. By their training Envoys are really good at any career that involves violence and the mental alterations done to them leave me openly doubting that an Envoy could adjust to a quiet peaceful life. By locking them out of the socially sanctioned careers that would allow them to exercise their unique gifts, you guarantee a steady amount of Envoys going into the criminal world. Which tells me that the UN government is either incredibly malicious, incredibly incompetent or both. I mean there are simple solutions here, ranging from throwing them onto new colony ships and making them someone else’s problem light years and centuries away to setting up things for retired envoys to do. Instead we have to be sloppy and stupid about our oppression; which is historically accurate at least. Takeshi is an extremely frustrated idealist who has collapsed into cynicism but still able to use all of his skills and talents. This doesn't mean he's a good person, Takeshi throughout the story shows hints of a brutality that he barely keeps in check. While he does seem to regard human life as having value, that value is very dependent on how he is feeling at the moment. That said, Takeshi is the hero that 25th century Earth deserves and needs right now. He needs all of his skills and talent because powerful men and women are lining up to stop him from getting at the truth and they will use any means to avert him. Torture, blackmail, bribery, assassination and more are all on the menu here and they're all pointed at Takeshi, so a certain amount of brutality is called for here.

He'll also have to figure out his relationship with the local cops, led by a Lt. Ortega who has her own reasons to be pissed off at Takeshi, some of which even have to do with him! Lt. Ortega's a pretty interesting character herself and gives us a look at the police force of a dystopian world. This is done very realistically. The police not so quietly loath Mr. Bancroft (who hates them in return) and are happy to wash their hands of his case so they can get back to real police work. The reason for this is a mutual lack of respect. Mr. Bancroft feels that as a man who has outlived civilizations he is owed a certain amount of deference and respect. The police feel that Mr. Bancroft is a disrespect to the concepts of law and order, which I know is shocking but a lot of cops take law and order seriously even if they might be iffy on the concept of justice. I can see the frustration in Lt. Ortega. She is constantly throwing herself and her men on the line and her thanks is a small paycheck and to be sneered at by the people who benefit the most from her work, while being actively hated by everyone else. That's going to sour even the sweetest of personalities if we're going to be honest.

Altered Carbon manages to tell a tightly focused story that interweaves through a larger backdrop. This is done by bringing in political concerns; for example the UN is discussing passing a resolution making the resleeving of any violent crime victim mandatory. This is opposed by the Catholic church, who believes that when your body dies your soul departs, so being resleeved is an abomination. So most Catholics have signed orders that they not be resleeved. This however has become an incredibly abused loophole. Criminal enterprises often require prostitutes and other expendable members to legally convert to Catholicism so they can't testify in their own murders. Additionally this turns Catholics into a massively exploited underclass targeted for various crimes that you can't get away with against the common man. Another larger theme is the fact that you no longer own your own body! Since the most common punishment is be put into storage (on stack) and out of body, your body then becomes a commodity that anyone with enough cash can pay for to use for whatever they like. This is key to several plot points in the novel that I don't want to give away so I'll just say this. If there are any specific things that a person should always own no matter what they’ve done... It's their mind and their body. These are in the most literal sense of the term your birthright and no government, no corporation, no religion, and no person has the right to take away either one from you. Even if you can hop from body to body. The fact that people in this system must struggle to retain ownership of their own bodies is frankly vile and renders the promise of the technology in the novel into a tool for ghoulish predation on the citizenry. To be fair, Mr. Morgan would point out that this is a dystopia! It's not supposed to be a great shiny system! I will admit that Mr. Morgan has succeeded in writing an amazing dystopia that pulled me into it that is populated with characters that while devastatingly flawed, are given human enough depth to be sympathetic, even as they wade through oceans of blood. In this case I think Kovacs becomes a heroic figure because he is literally fighting monsters here. That said I do have some minor complaints.  Like a lot of European writers, Mr. Morgan's idea of a Californian city is very...not American.  For example, where the bloody hell are the Mormons in all of this. The Mormon Church has involved itself in politics before but there's nothing of them here, only Catholics. That's kinda odd for America but works fairly well for Europe. Bay City, formerly San Francisco feels more like a European or even Scottish city then one in California. He's not the only writer who does this and given that it's set centuries in the future, I think it's excusable. It's certainly possible that 400 years in the future that San Francisco will feel like a worn out city in North England or Scotland, stripped of what we think of as it's Californian character. That said I would warn writers to be careful about writing places that seem close enough to you culturally but may be further away than you think. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan gets an A. This is likely the best first novel I've seen in awhile and shows what new ideas you can bring into Cyberpunk and science fiction.

Next week, we're going to do something a little different and I'm going to talk about the Altered Carbon netflix series (see told you I'd get back to it, didn't I?). Keep Reading!

This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.