Ready Player One: The Movie Directed by Steven Spielberg

Ready Player One: The Movie

Directed by Steven Spielberg

First, a quick note on how this review will go. Because this is a book review series, the movie will be receiving two scores. The first one will be on how well it holds up on its own as a movie; the second will be judging it on its merits as an adaptation of the novel. Fair warning there may be spoilers. Ready Reader? Let's go!

The movie rights for Ready Player One were bought before the book was even released to the public, what followed were a number of negotiations for rights to various characters that were actually completed fairly quickly all things considered. Now some rights were not able to be obtained, for example the rights for Ultraman, who plays a big part in the plot of the book, are the matter of some dispute at the moment. So the movie creators weren't able to get a hold of them because no one is really sure who to even talk to right now. So instead the Iron Giant was substituted. Most of the Spielberg references were removed on the insistence of Spielberg himself, because he felt it would be vain to pack the movie with references to his own work, even if his list of films is a massive cornerstone of the 80s. Let's take a look at Spielberg for a moment shall we?

Steven Spielberg was born December 18, 1946 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Cincinnati Ohio. Later as a child they moved to Phoenix, Arizona (once again a creative genius spends his childhood in this sun-blasted locale, I begin to wonder if there something in the water? [Editor: What water? Long live the fighters of Mua’Dib! Okay okay, it only has the temperature and dust storm of Arrakis, there are several rivers that have been fully drained by the time they hit Phoenix proper, and several artificial reservoirs. But if the metro area keeps growing the way it is… That’s gonna change.]) where Mr. Spielberg would take the first steps on his path by earning his photography merit badge using his father's movie camera, because the still camera was broken. At age sixteen he wrote and directed his first independent film. His parents would move to California and divorced before he graduated from high school. He moved to LA with his father and was accepted to California State University. While attending college he got a unpaid internship (Spielberg had one before they were cool/completely ubiquitous exploitation of free labor.) with Universal Studios, it was during that internship that he got a chance to make a 26 minute short film called Amblin'. The film won several awards at various film festivals and impressed Sid Sheinberg, a Vice President at Universal, who offered Spielberg a seven year director contract, making Mr. Spielberg the youngest ever signed director in Hollywood history. He would not complete his degree until 2002 (God, can you imagine being his film professor? Talk about imposter syndrome. “Hey Steve, you wanna just teach the class for the week? I’m going through a divorce and just… can’t handle this right now” or “Well Steve, I’d planned on having the class analyze one of your films but that’s right out now. Thanks.”) but considering we got ET, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark... I'm gonna say Mr. Spielberg likely made the right call there. Let's move on the movie itself shall we?

Ready Player One takes place in Columbus Ohio, in the Year of Our Lord 2045 AD. Wade Watts lives with his Aunt Alice and her crappy boyfriend Rick. His only escape is the OASIS, where he competes in the race for the copper key. The OASIS is a virtual reality internet, created by James Halliday. When Halliday died, he announced that whoever could get all three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) by defeating all three of the challenges, accessed by solving riddles which would lead to the challenge locations, would inherent all of his money (half a trillion dollars) and full control of the OASIS. As you can imagine this made some people excited. Someone figured out that the first riddle led to a race, where King Kong jealously guards the finish line. No one has made it past him in five years, until Wade finds a clue that lets him beat the race. This attracts the attention of the one of the more talented egg hunters Art3mis, a young lady that Wade has been a fan of for years and more dangerously attracts the attention of the villains of the piece Nolan Sorrento, leader of the corporation IOI. A corporation that has used predatory loan practices to amass a slave army of workers and Sixxers, young men and women who compete in the challenges using faceless avatars under the agreement that if they win, IOI gets full rights to the OASIS and will remake it in their corporate image. Wade now has to race against time and with the help of his friends defeat the corporation, save the OASIS from ruthless exploitation, and learn something about himself in the meantime (There’s the Spielberg schmaltz we all know and love).

Ready Player One the movie is a fairly standard plot held up by amazing visuals and locations. Like a dance club with zero g dancing or that race track I mentioned. While the plot is done well and the characters are decently acted and written, frankly if you've seen a movie about a plucky underdog out to save the world from the powers that be and grow up at the same time... You can call this plot beat for beat and get a handle on the characters pretty quickly (but I'll talk about that in the second part of the review). That said the visuals are amazing and the writing and acting is better than your average Michael Bay Movie, so if you liked those, you’ll like this. If you came only to see those action set pieces and all the references in the movie you'll have a blast. Otherwise the movie is pretty average and I'm gonna have to give Ready Player One a C as far as movies go.

Now let's talk about this an adaptation, so if you don't care how the novel and the movie compare you can stop right here. I'm not going to pretend I'm a fan of the novel, I gave it a C- after all. That said, there were interesting and clever things in the novel and most of them have been ripped out of the movie because they weren't safe. Let me start on the changes to the characters, Wade is kinda bleached out of his individual characteristics to make movie protagonist #4; a young man who wants to make it big with a heart of gold. Gone is his cheerful, unaware hypocrisy where he criticizes sixxers for selling out while agreeing to endorse products he's never used for money. Gone is his general cynical view of humanity and his distrust of groups. Now instead of talking about using 500 billion dollars to build a spaceship to escape Earth and start over, he babbles about living in luxury. The movie softens him to a degree and makes his poverty less real as a result. Movie Wade does not feel like a kid living in poverty, he feels like a middle class boy chasing the dream of wealth. Book Wade did feel like a boy who came up from poverty, having a willingness to do things simply to get out of poverty and stay out of it. Also drained of gray characteristics is Nolan Sorrento. In the novel Sorrento is allowed to have some skill and actual grasp of the pop culture everyone is obsessing about. Not only that but in the book Sorrento isn't presented as a coward. The film goes out of it's way to make him look like a craven suit, bumbling to control something he doesn't like or understand but wants because it'll make money. Bluntly, this drains him of menace and dimension. Art3mis is given what I feel is an unnecessary tragic backstory and turned into your bog standard rebel fighter against the evil empire. She's also changed from Canadian to American (Why? I can almost understand but never approve white washing but… Red-white-and-blue washing? Why? The only cultural differences anyone would notice in a movie are accent, apology frequency, poutine, and saying zed instead of zee {Because everyone must be from Ohio in this movie… EVERYONE!}). These are all safe changes made to the characters to make them more like stock movie characters. There's nothing wrong with stock characters on their own, they serve as a shorthand for the audience but when you take a character and turn them into a stock archetype, you're basically deciding not to take any risk and to avoid doing work getting the audience to understand and connect to the characters in their own right. Now some of the changes were good, having Aech be a modder and craftsmen who makes money by creating new items on the OASIS was a nice touch and I liked that nod to the modder community in general. I am utterly annoyed by the changes made to Daito and Shoto, who in the novel were Japanese shut ins, referencing a real social problem in Japan, and it made the OASIS feel bigger to know that there people from other nations in it. It made the OASIS feel more like the internet we have today. Instead in the movie there's no reference to their nationality, but given their age and the fact that they show up in Ohio in person... I have to assume they're Asian Americans (*Editor Twitches*). This makes the movie OASIS feel smaller and more like a virtual reality arcade then an actual internet. We didn't need all five of our protagonists to come from the same city! Not in a movie about the bloody world wide web!(Of course we do Frigid, that’s how Spielberg rolls. He has to have his small-town Schmaltz, and if he can’t have that, it’s parental issues. So many parental issues.)

Additionally much of the indepth nerdery was taken out to pander to a wider crowd. So instead of Dungeons and Dragons adventures which are solved by Wade learning the right Latin word at the right moment, we get the race instead (Oh for the love of… The people who go to see this movie are going to at least know what Dungeons and Dragons is, and everyone pretty much recognizes Latin when they hear it even if they don’t speak it. I really don’t see the point of this one, even for the sake of pandering to the widest possible demographic. It can be de-geeked a little bit without losing that completely. What the hell?). The obscure animes of the 80s are replaced with references both visual and audio to major movies and video games. This makes it feel less like a celebration of geek culture and more a pandering trip to the widest lane on the nostalgia highway so as to hit as much of the audience as possible. I'm being a bit of a snob here, there's nothing wrong with preferring King Kong, Overwatch, and Doom over Dune, D&D, and Joust; but when you remove major references from the novel, I can't help but feel the motive was to pander to a wider audience so you could get at their wallets. In my view the film drains away what little subtly there was in the novel and replaces it with more pandering when the story was already dangerously over the top with it as it was.

I'm also going to take a shot at the changes made to the message of the story. In the novel the message was that pop culture obsessions cannot and do not take the place of real communities or relationships with real people. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies or liking certain kinds of entertainment but you need to balance that with spending time with actual people. Wade had to learn that by burning bridges with his friends and struggling to rebuild those bridges and work with them to win in the novel. Here it's reduce to a quick, power of friendship and a message that you damn kids need to go outside and stop staring at those damn machines so much. Given all of this. as an adaptation I have to give Ready Player One the adaptation a D+.

Well... Next week we're heading back to the books! We're reviewing Platinum Magic by Dr. Bruce Davis. Nut first, this Sunday a joint-sidebar with both your editor and I, your reviewer discussing a topic I like to call Crouching Author, Hidden Minority. Keep Reading!

Sidebar III: Snow Crash vs Ready Player One

Sidebar III: Snow Crash vs Ready Player One

I find it interesting that the two books are even compared at all really. Usually comparison arises when books are published fairly closely together, have similar characters or subject matter. Instead Hiro and Y.T are very different from Wade and the worlds they inhabit are fairly different as well. The stories themselves are different in a lot of ways a well. Still let's take a look at the two shall we?

First let me map what I found the books shared. Both books have a semi-humorish tone to them, Snow Crash's humor comes from the near parody like nature of it's world. Where it rides that fine line between absolute parody of cyberpunk and maintaining a fairly serious world. Ready Player One's humor comes more from the situation of imaging a teenager in 2045 being obsessed with Atari games and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The humor is fairly different though, Snow Crash invites us to share a chuckle while Ready Player One works really hard to make that outlandish behavior make sense and feel serious. I'm going to be honest and Ready Player One is actually fairly successful in that by tying that ridiculous behavior into a high reward in the story (If you can remember the lines to War Games, you might have a shot at winning enough money to match the GDP of a medium sized country after all). Both Hiro and Wade are fairly skilled with computers and like Y.T, Wade is growing up in a world that is flying to pieces. The biggest common ground however is the existence of a virtual reality internet in both stories. The Metaverse in Snow Crash and the OASIS in Ready Player One. Let me take a look at them.

The Metaverse is fairly constrained and honestly somewhat pedestrian compared to the OASIS. It presents itself as a single vast globe that can be traveled by train or programmed vehicles. People buy virtual estate in the Metaverse and build offices, homes and headquarters for their internet needs. People move about in avatar with most people using black and white flat avatars with computer experts using more realized avatars and the wealthy buying off the shelf colored avatars for their convenience. All in all it's not a terrible view of the internet but it is constrained by the fact it was written in 1992 when the web was in it's infancy at best and no one really quiet knew it's full potential. Additionally the Metaverse does not get the same amount of attention lavished on it as OASIS does as most of Snow Crash takes place in the real world.

Meanwhile in Ready Player One, the OASIS is where the action is. The OASIS is bigger, more realized and immersive then the Metaverse. It's not a single globe, it's a galaxy of planets you can teleport around in if you have the money or fly using spells, spaceships or anything a programmer can dream of. People conduct business, play games, go to school, work, hang out, fight and love in this place. The OASIS feels like the internet turned into a truly amazing Massive Multi-Player Online Game. Everyone starts off with fully rendered and 3d avatars just like most MMOs but through grinding or money you can upgrade pretty quick. Ready Player One details the world of OASIS fairly deeply and devotes a good deal of time to it because the OASIS is most of the story takes place. Given that the book was written in 2008, it's no surprise that a greater understanding of the internet and it's culture is displayed in this book.

Let's take a look at our characters. I'm going to stick to our 3 main characters for brevity sakes. Hiro is a loner who could take a respected position in his society of hackers and programmers but refuses to due to distinct distaste for authority and a fear of being turned into an assembly line worker. Y.T is young woman who has rejected most of her society because it requires her to dumb herself down and pretend to be less capable then she really is. Hiro chooses to do most of his work in the Metaverse but has no problem getting his hands dirty in the real world (or even resorting to reason if necessary) if the stakes become high enough. Y.T is unrelentingly a citizen of the real world and embraces it fully. Both Hiro and Y.T accept their world and don't waste a lot of time thinking about how things were better in the past. That may be because Hiro as African American would look at the past as a time when he would have been locked out of his rightful part of things for something as petty as his skin color and Y.T simply inclined to think that way as she's very much someone who focuses on the present. Wade makes no bones about the fact that he thinks he lives in one of the crappiest times in history (I would say he's wrong but would admit the world he describes can't be called good). He, unlike the two above is very focused on the past and how things were better back then. Wade is also someone who has a community but refuses to take a bigger part in it out of a combination of pride and shame. Shame over his poverty and pride in refusing to ask for help instead clinging to the hope that he can strike it big on his own efforts. While it would look like something he shares in common with Hiro along with a love of computers, there's a difference. Hiro is coder and a programmer, one of the men who actually built the Metaverse, line by line. Wade is a gamer and while not a terrible programmer it's not his main skill set nor did he have anything to do with the creation of the Metaverse, Wade's struggle to take over a fully created world that he had no choice but to be in. Hiro's struggle is to understand the world he's help create, his role in it and to protect it. I suppose Wade might grow up in way to be like Hiro but I find it unlikely. Wade is honestly more set in his ways then Hiro and more committed to a course of action. I would honestly say both men reflect the generations they come from with Hiro being full of Generation X confusion bordering on apathy and Wade showing the self belief and frustrated determination of the Millennials.

This leads me over to the themes of the books in question which are also both very different. Snow Crash is a consideration of what Memes mean and what they do, how they tie into language and the very power of language over how we view the world. After all if you don't have a word for something how can you fully understand it? How can you explain it to others without words to give the concept meaning? What if someone could use a word to take that understanding away from you? What if someone could use a word to take you away from you? Weaving through that is a theme of coming to understand yourself and what it is you want to do in the world. Although I would consider that a lesser theme in Snow Crash. In Ready Player One, what Wade has to learn is that his obsessions are not a replacement for real relationships with real people. That while it's perfectly fine to have interests that you devote time and energy to, you also need to devote time and energy to being a member of society and not shutting yourself away from everyone. Wade's struggle to connect to his fellow human being is part of his coming of age. This is a young man who only had one close friend that he had never met in real life and never been on so much as a date by the start of the story.

Although now that I think about it there are a couple of other things that the books have in common. Wade, Hiro and Y.T are all status quo heroes. Wade wants to protect the current status of OASIS from being changed by the greedy corporation of IOI. Hiro and Y.T want to protect their world from being overwritten by a businessman who thinks he can become a god. Both are trying to maintain the world in it's current state against people would change it, in their opinion at least for the worst. This doesn't mean that they're against change but the changes that Hiro, Y.T and Wade do push forward in their stories are changes on a personal level in how they relate to their world and those around them. They don't seek to make sweeping changes to that world for good or for ill. It also interesting to note that in both books the villains are corporations. IOI is faceless villain for the most part, the sixers all look alike and Nolan Sorrento the leaders of the sixers is only a lackey for faceless powers that be. Meanwhile the corporation in Snow Crash has a face in Bob Rife, who is the owner of the business and the mastermind of the plot that Hiro and Y.T work to foil. The motivations are different however, as IOI seeks to seize the OASIS as a profit engine and possibly gain control over a major engine of the world's economy, while Bob Rife intends to flat out rule the world through being able to control the populace directly.

In the end I don't think Ready Player One stole anything from Snow Crash, the idea of a virtual reality style internet is one that has been around for a long time. If nothing else the existence of stories like Tron and Lawnmower Man would inspire someone towards that end eventually. Also corporations as villains is a staple in dystopias and cyberpunks and the motivations, organization and operations of the two villains in question are so different that I can't see Mr. Cline has taking to much inspiration from Snow Crash. I would argue that these are two very different books and I remain surprised at the threads on reddit and the various articles that insist on comparing them.  While there are similarities, they're fairly skin deep ones in alot of ways.  I remain steadfast in my belief that Snow Crash is the better book and the better story but I can also see how some people would prefer Ready Player One as the themes of that story and the journey that Wade goes through are very modern ones and might resonate more with certain readers then the themes in Snow Crash.

Next Friday, we take on Ready Player One the movie and after that Platinum Magic. This has been your reviewer reminding you, keep reading!

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One

by Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline was born in March of 1972, in Ashland Ohio. Before becoming a novelist Mr. Cline performed at Austin Poetry Slam venues with some success, becoming a national champion in 1998 and 2001. In 2005 he sold a screenplay for a movie called Fanboys,  was released in 2007. It didn't do well. Part of that was the great deal of drama around the movie where massive changes were made to the story-line and then frantic attempts were made to repair those changes. Another part is likely the limited release; it simply didn't play in very many theaters. The last part would be that according to most who saw the film, it just wasn't very good. Still to Mr. Cline's credit he picked himself up, dusted himself off and jumped right back in. Today he's lives in Austin Texas with his wife Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, a nonfiction writer and poet, and their children. Let's take a look at Ready Player One.

Ready Player One was a New York Times bestseller and was praised by NPR, CNN, io9 and more. Described as everything from large hearted to a page turner. Warner Brothers bought the screen rights to the book before it even hit bookstore shelves. While it was widely celebrated at the time, I didn't read it. I saw it at the bookstore, read the back of it, and decided to buy another book. It wasn't until last year when I heard a movie was being made and one of my best friends mentioned he loved the book and read it every year that I decided I should give it a shot. Let's discuss shall we.

Ready Player One takes place in the increasingly not so distant year of 2045 where humanity is something of an energy shortage but still has plenty of electricity to power a virtual reality internet (World of Warcraft according to the best information I could find uses 75,000 CPUs across 10 data centers to provide 24/7 access to a player base in the mere millions) that everyone is using. Our Hero is Wade Watts, a young man who’s rather grim life. Both his parents are dead, his father dying when he was very young and his mother overdosing on drugs when he was eleven. His aunt would tell you that she took him in, but considering she doesn't let him sleep in her part of the trailer and only uses him to commit food voucher and welfare fraud, I wouldn't believe her on a bet. Wade was basically raised by the public school system and OASIS, the virtual reality internet system created mostly on the efforts of one insane genius James Halliday. As a result despite being somewhat socially awkward, he is really good at games and computers in general. In the real world Wade lives in a haphazardly welded together tower of trailers (Editor: FOR THE LOVE OF MARX!  WHERE ARE THE BUILDING CODES!?{Have I mentioned I'm not responsible for my editor?}) north of Oklahoma City (I'll come back to this [editor:screams in terror]) and has to ride a bike to generate enough electricity to access the OASIS . What's interesting about the OASIS is that you can access it for the one time cost of $0.25 for a lifetime account with a single avatar. With that avatar you literally gain access to an entire galaxy, whole planets of games, information and services. Wade even goes to school within the OASIS, a program started by the government to cut down on fuel consumption (and honestly not a terrible idea) What gives him hope and keeps him going is the idea of finding the Easter Egg.

When James Halliday died, a video was released, promising that anyone who could find the hidden Easter egg would inherent Halliday's billions (How did he make billions off a service that’s a $0.25 lifetime subscription?  Advertisement?  Licensing for developers?  Do the Users have to pay for premium content or something?{A combination of selling virtual goods and selling virtual real estate, to move from one world to another  you pay a fee to the OASIS owner, to own “land” you pay the OASIS owner, etc} ) and ownership of the OASIS. This was protected by a iron clad will and a standing army of lawyers that would terrify national governments into submission. Large groups of men and women have devoted themselves to this task calling themselves gunters. Many of them are organized into clans, cooperative efforts to find the egg and share the prize, while others hunt alone, refusing aide. Given Halliday's obsession with 1980s era entertainment and trivia, they pore over the video games, movies and music of the time hoping to find a clue to the riddle that will let them even begin the search. This has led to the 1980s becoming a major fad among teenagers and the younger adults. However they're not the only ones looking for the egg, the corporation of IOI is also looking, with a paid army of hunters, called sixers. Sixers give up all rights to the prize in exchange for a wage, steady work, health care and dental (Behold the way capital exploits the working class and alienates them from the value of their labor.  Look, communism doesn’t work, but I’ll be damned if good old Karl wasn’t a fantastic diagnostician). IOI is widely despised for their plans to turn the OASIS into place you can only access for paying a monthly subscription fee and to unleash advertisers all over the OASIS. Wade is a gunter but honestly doesn't expect to find the egg, it's just something to give him hope... Until he solves the first riddle...

The world building is honestly kind of uneven. The OASIS is very well done with attention given to detail building off of current internet standards and expanding them and moving them forward. As such I can fully believe that the OASIS works more or less the way Mr. Cline says it does. It's an amazing world to write and play in and you could honestly set entire stories within the OASIS and not ever touch the real world; which might be a good thing, because the “real world” of Ready Player One isn't one I can buy at all. For one thing I was brought up from childhood in and around Oklahoma City, you are not going to have rickety welded together skyscrapers of trailers there (That might happen in Texas though, where the state doesn’t even have a fire code, leaving those to county and municipal governments.  Honestly, any society that gives as few shits about the poor as this one seemingly does, is gonna have some pretty ramshackle slums.). Oklahoma gets on average 52 tornadoes a year. Oklahoma county, the county containing the Oklahoma City metro area holds the distinction of having the 2nd most tornadoes hitting in that state! Moore Oklahoma, (which is right bloody next to Oklahoma City) was hit by 4 high powered tornadoes in a sixteen year period. You can verify this with a five minute web search. If I wanted to be nasty I could make the comment that this novel is really just Wade's last dream as he lies under the shattered remains of his home dying from blood loss after it was leveled by an F5. For that matter I found the villains entirely too black and white to be believable. IOI's plan is to make the OASIS accessible only to people who pay a monthly fee is an act of a profit hating lunatic. A modern corporation wouldn't endanger it's monopoly like that, not out of any morality or goodness mind you but because it's way more profitable to allow people to continue to access the OASIS but add a bunch of pay to win features. You want to level up your avatar? Sure you could grind newbie quests and hunt rats... Or you could buy XP, $16.99 gets you 10,000 XP! Ultra rare artifacts in our loot crates, only $35 a crate! For that matter the vast mass of people on the OASIS is itself a commodity, simply change the user agreement giving IOI the rights to sell your data for targeted advertisements that only you will see tailored to your tastes and experiences! These are business models that not only exists but have often brought in way more profit then the pay to play model. There's a reason so many tablet and phone games are free to play but littered with micro-transactions, and Facebook has proven that you can build a wildly successful company using your consumers as your product. That's not the only issue, frankly there isn't a lot of thought given to the real world set up beyond a vague hand wave and a firm declaration that everything sucks so people lose themselves in the OASIS. We're not shown this bluntly, we're told this by Wade. I found myself constantly trying to hold myself back from trying to outsmart the world. Wade mentions that the oil ran out (I'm sure this is a simplification by a 18 year old boy who really isn't paying attention due to his addiction to Virtual Realty) and thus cars are barely used etc. I find myself asking what about biodiesel? Liquid Coal? Did you know you could make a car run on natural gas? Hell, Electric cars? We're already building the infrastructure for them (Did this society completely reject the splitting of the atom?  I mean, with sufficient Glorious Nuclear Power Plants, we could use hydrogen fuel cells for transport pretty easily, or pull the CO2 from the atmosphere and make our own hydrocarbons for liquid fuel if we had to.). I'm honestly being picky but it just kinda shows how little world building went into the real world side of the setting where I'm questioning the central premise in under 10 pages. For many readers this isn't gonna matter, for me, it gets in my teeth.

Which brings me to the biggest problem in the novel, we're told a lot of things but not shown them. The entire novel is written from Wade's point of view as a memoir of sorts. Which is a good and interesting narrative framing device but does slap some hard limits on your story. Since we can only be aware of things Wade is aware of and the our knowledge of the world is only as good as Wade's. We're told that VR classrooms are amazing but we don't get to see them. We're told that Art3mis and Wade had built a relationship through spending a lot of time together but we don't see it. So I find myself not very invested in it and just kind of shrugging when that relationship runs into bumps and rocky points. We do get shown enough of Aech and Wade together (barely) that their relationship feels like a real one but not as close as Wade would claim it is. Now I did like the inclusion of non-western characters in the form of Shoto and Daito, a pair of Japanese gunters that Wade would claim as friends as well and the interactions we see were really well done. The brief parts of the books that were devoted to it really captured the wariness and problems of forming a relationship with someone you're competing with to win enough money to make Tony Stark look twice but we're told about the major episodes in this relationship instead of shown them! As a result the relationships don't feel... Real. I reject the idea that this is a result of those relationships being formed on the internet. Some of my closest friends are people I met on the internet and have only seen in person a handful of times. Don't get me wrong, you need friends in your local area but that doesn't mean your net buddies aren't real friends either. That said if you're going to write a book where your main characters creating relationships with other people is important to the plot... Then show me the character doing it. Don't say “Oh and I hung out with protagonist C every other Saturday, we became good friends by raiding dungeons!” Show me protagonist C and you raiding a bloody dungeon! Make it a chapter in the book! Because otherwise the relationship doesn't feel real or organic, it feels like PLOT. It's not that you and protagonist C are buddies because you've raided the dungeons of the Mad Liche Bard of Byzas together. You're buddies because the PLOT says you are.


Since this book is told uncompromisingly from Wade's point of view, I'm going to tell you up front if you end up hating him, you'll hate the book. Personally I'm okay with Wade. He's a good kid, has a lot of growing to do but in your late teens who doesn't? Wade is also a fairly believable character.  He's a young man who, because of a lack of practice and role models to learn from, has a lot of trouble interacting with people outside of narrow fields of interest. Wade would likely struggle very hard to keep up a conservation with a stranger in a bar unless that stranger brought up something he loved. I can sympathize with that and that's a fairly realistic weakness to have in my view. Because of this Wade loses himself in a subculture that places a low requirement on social skills and will accept him as long as he learns about the same trivia and appreciates the same cultural artifacts that they do. There are millions of people who do that. The whole idea of fandom is kinda based off being accepted as long as you like the same thing everyone else in the group does and gunters in the end are kind of a short hand for fandoms across the internet. Wade is a fairly well done character, he manages to be clever but believably so. He's also rather flawed in his obsession with Art3mis and in being a bit of hypocrite. He's very disdainful of the men and women who signed up to be sixers as sellouts (he demonizes the competition, it’s normal) but once Wade makes it big? He signs every endorsement deal he's offered without a thought, for the money. Which is... Well.. Selling out. Given his abject poverty, it's perfectly understandable that he leap at a chance to have money but... You get what I mean.


The beginning of this book is also very rough (based on the first 20 pages alone the grade would have been lower.) and there are pacing issues as well. That said the plot is fairly well done, I thought the riddles were interesting and Wade's various plans and schemes were usually in my opinion passingly clever.  That said other characters are allowed to solve problems or come up with ideas that work.  So I wasn't left feeling that Wade was the only smart character in a world full of idiots. Sometimes he just comes off as lucky, or has to play catch up to other characters which helps reinforce the idea that Wade isn't the only person here with a working brain and motivation. There's a good story here and there are good characters buried in here. Unfortunately we're only really told about most of these characters as opposed to actually spending a lot of time with those characters. We're told more then we're shown, which in my opinion doesn't make for a good book. I honestly think Ready Player One could have used another draft or two to cut down on the amount of telling and devote more space to showing the relationships between Wade and the other players. For that matter we could have done with fewer references for the point of having references. All in all this honestly does feel like Mr. Cline's first novel and one that wasn't polished enough before release. I'm not without hope for improvement in the future and I can understand why some people would enjoy the novel.  However, that doesn't counter the book’s many problems for me and I'm giving Ready Player One by Mr. Ernest Cline a C-. The book isn't the worst thing ever but that doesn't make it good.


Next week, I tackle the movie. This Sunday we look at RP1 vs Snow Crash.  Keep Reading!

This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.

Announcement!

Announcement!

So welcome to the reopening of our sidebar! These will be posts, most likely slapped up on Sunday that aren't book reviews but will be discussing things that are book related. Like specific concepts (say suspension of disbelieve, or consistent characterization) or whatever else I think is worth comment on this review series. These won't happen every week but whenever I feel there's a topic worth conservation and I hope you will join readers. Our upcoming sidebar will be Snow Crash VS Ready Player One!

I had been planing on reviewing Snow Crash for over a year now. It's a grand novel and one of those things I would encourage fans of cyber punk, science fiction or general fiction fans to try out. Ready Player One wasn't something I was planning on reviewing, even with the movie. Until I saw an article where the writer was claiming that Ready Player One was a rip off of Snow Crash, which given what I knew of both plots... Seemed a damn odd claim.

Then on Reddit and other internet places where folks discuss and compare books, RP1 and Snow Crash kept getting throw together. Which was odd to me. So I decided I would look into it. So next week Sunday, after I have posted the book review. I'll be posting it as if it was a book review but if the subject doesn't interest you feel free to skip it.

That said, here's my view going in. I don't see RP1 or Snow Crash has having much in common beyond Virtual Reality Internet. While Snow Crash certainly comes first in that regard, I don't think every work that uses Virtual Reality Internet is a rip off of it. Maybe I'm missing something, do you think so? Please feel free to chime in the comments, twitter or elsewhere. Tell me what you think readers and next week, tell me if I changed your mind.

Keep Reading. Your reviewer.

Snow Crash By Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

By Neal Stephenson​

"Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"

Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

Hiro and Juanita, Chapter 26​

A meme is a behavior, idea or style that spreads from person to person, it is the unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices. They can be transmitted through any means of communication: speech, writing, music, images, even gestures can be used to transmit a meme or become a meme. Some supporters of the idea often compare memes to genes, in that they replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. That's not the book we're reviewing today, instead we're reviewing another book that tackles memes and did so before the phrase Dank Meme broached from the dark depths of the internet. Snow Crash, approaches the idea of memes in a very related but very different way, instead of comparing memes to genes. Mr. Stephenson in Snow Crash instead compares memes to viruses.

Neal Stephenson was born October 31, 1959 in Fort Meade Maryland to a family of engineers and scientists. His family would move to Iowa afterwards where he graduated high school. He then returned to the east coast to study at Boston University. He started out as a physics student but switched to geography upon realizing that would give him more time on the university mainframe. In his first couple of books, he sharpened his skills for satire, parody, and tense action. Snow Crash, which was released in 1992, was his big break grabbing him a lot of attention, and was nominated for the British Scenic Fiction Award and the Arthur C Clarke award, Time magazine would place it on the 100 best English Language Novels.

Snow Crash takes place in an early 21st century LA where economic collapse has all but killed the United States. The land of the nation has been divided into patches of privately owned gated communities, such as New South Africa, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and more. Each of these enclaves have their own legal codes, enforced by hired mercenary security forces and are linked by privately owned highways that compete for traffic (Editor: So… Ancap heaven? Hell for me I suppose, but at least all the ancaps agree that child sex-slaves are bad…That is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.). Even the mail is privatized. Everything is delivered by hired couriers. Even national defense and intelligence services are done by private corporations with the federal government broken into a few struggling enclaves that are increasingly irrelevant to the society around them. Even organizations like the Mafia and the South American Cartels have become corporations that operate in broad daylight, with the Mob and the Cartels often taking their competition to the level of open urban warfare. We also learn that while North America has degraded into anarcho-capitalist chaos a lot of the world is even worse because refugees from Asia come across the Pacific in their hundreds of thousands by the Raft. The Raft is a massive conglomeration of ships tied together propelled by the tide and wind of the ocean with the aircraft carrier Enterprise at the center (What. The. Fuck?). Every couple of years in a cycle the Raft unleashes a tide of refugees who survived the violent lawlessness of the Raft by being the fastest, strongest and most ruthless of the people trapped on the Raft (Cannibalism! Fun for the whole family!) onto the beaches of the west coast. The good people of the west coast react in a number of way and surprisingly only some of them involve machine guns!

Within this manic chaos live and work our characters: the freelance hacker and master sword fighter Hiro Protagonist and the 15 year old skateboarding radical courier, Y.T (standing for Yours Truly). Neither of these two were born with those names. Hiro, the half black, half Korean son of a WWII vet, adopted the name because, let's be honest, you're never forgetting that name are you? Not being forgettable is rather important when you're a freelancer. Hiro does most of his work in the Metaverse, a Virtual Reality style internet that people interact with through the creation of avatars. Hiro was one of the early coders of the Metaverse, he helped write the software that keeps it running and as such he knows a number of little exploits that allow him certain advantages. In real life Hiro isn’t bad with the matched pair of Japanese swords he wears, a traditional daisho of katana and wakizashi. But in the Metaverse? He's the best damn sword fighter in the world, because he wrote the code that allows for sword fighting in the first place (Dev Hax!). Y.T changed her name to keep her mother, a federal worker, from figuring out that she skateboards on freeways using a magnetic harpoon to latch onto cars to go faster as she delivers packages for a living, and because she thought it was cool. That second part is as anyone with experience with teenagers will tell you is the main reason. Despite her age, she is one of the best couriers in LA and incredibly skilled at taking care of herself and others. When she feels like it. Hiro and Y.T are partners in intelligence gathering and they are both separately and together pulled into a massive plot to destroy the world and rebuild it in someone else's image. This is where the meme's come into play you see.

There's a new drug on the street that shares a name with a virus appearing in the metaverse. Snow Crash, when used in the metaverse it disconnects the target from not just his computer but attacks him through his mind. It only affects programmers, attacking them through their understanding of binary. In the real world, the drug snow crash causes people to increasingly disconnect from reality, behave irrationally and increasingly experience bouts of glossolalia, or as most of us likely know it as speaking in tongues (Dang it! It’s a virus and not lovecraftian? Someone call Charles Stross.). The two are clearly related but how? Additionally how does this tie in to the reappearance of Hiro's ex-girlfriend and love of his life Juanita and her obsession with the language and religion of ancient Sumeria? (That’s more like it! Bring on the lovecraftian nightmares!) Hiro finds himself digging through the collected research of a professor who had been working on a theory about how Sumeria; the fact the humans speak many different languages; and religious expression throughout history, are all connected and can be used as an instrument of control. Mr. Stephanson also leaps into languages, in specific the discussion of not just why do we have a bunch of different languages but why do languages tend to diverge over time instead of converge? (Because language evolves by a process very similar to natural selection and isolation creates change?) Now this may seem strange because these days we live in a period of massive language convergence, which is due to the ease of global travel and communication. Not only are many languages disappearing under the onslaught of mass media, global trade and cultural assimilation but the languages that remain strong tend to pick up words from each other. You can see this by the appearance of English words in Japanese for example. The existence of English itself is a massive example of this, as it started as the unwieldy fusion of the French Normans and the Germanic language of the Anglo Saxons. Mr. Stephenson uses the idea of the Tower of Babel and in doing so also creates a bit of alternative history to go along with his Cyberpunk, which is a pretty good mix overall.

Meanwhile Y.T finds herself increasingly connected with the Mafia and the plans of Uncle Enzo the leader of the Mob in America to find the source of the Snow Crash drug in the real world and end it before it becomes a danger to the Mob's business plan (yes, this is a story where the mob saves the world, because it's good for business). It's through this that we see the Mob's own understanding of meme's which is rather rough and ready and how they see them as something to resist. Their belief is that they can resist ideology and through it the transmission of harmful memes by eschewing ideology all together and instead instituting a system of personal relationships and promises to substitute for policies and belief systems (So… neo-feudalism?). This is however subtly shown as failing because that idea itself is an ideology and therefore a meme. This is shown by the dissatisfaction of the elders of the Mob with the middle management that is coming up the ladder behind them. Often complaining that the youths and managers they've trained to look over the vast corporate empire that the Mob has built lack flexibility and a certain hungry desire. Instead they stick to the traditions laid down for them and operate by the procedures outlined for them. As always I find these complaints by elders very ironic since my reply to elders complaining about the youth is pretty much always the same. They are what you made them to be. If they have been made into something you didn't want, maybe you should start asking yourself just what you've been doing this whole time. Y.T on the other hand gains the approval of the Mob by rejecting the structures of it and the ideas underlying their organization. She's a very self sufficient young woman, who refuses to be to closely identified with a group, even her own couriers group. This is displayed by her relationship with Hiro, where she works outside the normal role of a courier by also dabbling in information gathering, and her willingness to ignore basically any rule she doesn't care for. Granted in this version of the future there aren't too many rules left to ignore.

The book shines mostly in its character work, the characters are well defined and in many cases larger than life. Hiro is an incredibly American character, being a half Black, half Korean man who is utterly obsessed with Japanese ideas and cultures but doesn't have the firmest grasp of what they actually mean. Meanwhile Y.T herself displays a cocky self-assurance through most of the book that masks the fact that she's not even old enough to drive and isn't really thinking everything through. Which I think most people would also consider rather American. They're supported by characters that don't take the center stage but are still powerful characters in their own right. Uncle Enzo would easily be an interesting protagonist for example, as would Juanita. The antagonist are suitably terrifying, especially the Aleut Raven, who would also be very able to serve as a centerpiece for a story. Mr. Stephenson also shows a great talent for humor and dancing between the line of parody and seriousness. Snow Crash parodies a great number of the ideas of cyberpunk and the common elements that appear in those stories by taking them to their ridiculous end point. At the same time there's enough realism mixed in and enough seriousness that you don't feel that Mr. Stephenson is trying to be hateful towards the genre but instead inviting everyone to take a step back and have a chuckle at just how silly some of this stuff can be when you look at it in the right way. The book itself takes a good hard look at memes especially those communicated through religion, which even today is one of the most effective memes and vector for their transmission, and how that can be a tool for good or evil. Meme's can promote independence, rational thought, and freedom of expression... Or they can promote mindless obedience, self destructive behavior, and willing enslavement of yourself to people who view you as a resource to be expended. That is always something you need to keep in mind. In the end, even the dankest of memes is nothing more than a tool.

The book's not perfect, Mr. Stephenson does get some historical facts wrong and also makes a big deal about the disappearance of the Sumerian language. While there's still some debate about it, most folks think it might have had something to do with the conquest of Sumner by the Akkadians, who were the first guys in human history to build an out and out empire. With that conquest Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian and while it lingered much the same way Latin does today, eventually it was replaced by other languages. Another note is the fact that Pentecostal Christianity didn't start in Kansas, the idea of speaking in tongues did but it wasn't codified as a part of worship until the Pentecostal churches got started... In L.A. I don't think this detracts from the book that much although I am enough of picky nerd to point it out in the review. Still I can forgive a science fiction writer for playing a little fast and loose with history in order to tell one hell of an inventive story that encourages you think a bit on things. That said, I love this book. It shows just what you can accomplish with science fiction and Cyberpunk in general and the fact that you can look at these serious and heavy themes but still have the space and time to have a good laugh. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson gets an A from me.

Next week, we get a little more modern with Ready Player One. Keep reading.
This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.

Mice Templar Vol I By Bryan JL Glass and Michael Avon Oeming

Mice Templar

By Bryan JL Glass and  Michael Avon Oeming

Art by Michael Avon Oeming

Byran Glass was raised with two siblings in a Philadelphia neighborhood known as Fishtown.  Originally he wanted to pursue a career in filmmaking but was pulled into the world of comics instead;  first by providing photo covers for various comics and becoming a writer in the early 90s.  While he did work for the big two (Marvel and DC) he kept returning to independent comics.  His most famous work is likely the comic series Powers, on which he worked alongside Michael Avon Oeming. This wasn't the first time they worked together but it was the most famous one.  Powers would win several awards and become a television series. Today he lives with his wife Judy in Pennsylvania. He first started work on Mice Templar in 2003 when Michael Avon Oeming brought him on board to help flesh out the story and concepts.   Michael Oeming got started in comics when he was 14, starting as an inker and it was as an inker on Daredevil that he got his big break. Afterwards he would work on a number of titles both for DC and Marvel as well as Indie comics but his work on Powers that gave him the influence to try out an idea.  Inspired  by the secret of N.I.M.H and Watership down (although ironically he never read a single Redwall book) he wanted to try telling a mythic fantasy story using mice.  The first volume of Mice Templar was published in 2009 by Image comics after years of toil.  It would go on to win a Harvey award, named after Harvey Kurtzman and founded in 1988 to take over the Kirby awards which were discontinued in 1987.  So let's take a look at volume I.

Once upon a time, in the Dark Lands, the night time dwelling of mice, a warrior priest named Kulh-en rose up to unite the mouse tribes and founded a warrior order to protect mice and other creatures from the many, many predators that hunted them (Editor who studies predation: rodents, the potato chips of terrestrial ecosystems like ducklings are marsh pringles).  They were called the Mice Templar.  Like all mortal creatures Kulh-en died, but the order he created endured.  It was tested and triumphed but triumph brings its own tests.  The doom of the Mice Templar came not from it's many external enemies but from within.  Greed, disunity and the politics those things bred led to a civil war within the order, where Templar fought Templar and the order was shattered.  With the fall of the order, came the fall of Mouse Society, now each city and village turns away from each other and the ties that held mousekind together fray in the face of corruption and cruelty.  Faith in their god Wotan is falling and in its place rises a new religion worshiping the very creatures that devour them, led by an order of rat Druids who have allied themselves with the last Mouse King.  A king whose lust for power has driven him mad. It's in this world that our main character Karic was born and raised.  Now a young mouse on the verge of adulthood, he is pushed into the center of events that he doesn't really understand when an army of Rats attack and destroys his village and takes his family into slavery.  Karic is driven by visions granted to him by Wotan and other ancient gods and the belief that he is being called to carry out a purpose.  A purpose that no one else understands and that most of them don't believe in.  Whether it be the mouse who trains him Pilot the tall, the very priesthood of Wotan or the ragged remains of the Templar order, still lingering over their self inflicted wounds.

Nor is Karic the only figure in this story.  His family has been dragged away to slavery or even worst fates in the one-time capital of the Mouse Nation, among them his best friend Leito.  Like Karic, Leito is carried forward by his fate in Wotan, but unlike Karic Leito doesn't have mystic visions to sustain that faith.  In a lot of ways, I'm finding Leito to be the braver character, and one I can understand better.  That said Karic isn't hard to grasp.  He, like a number of characters I could point to in the Bible or other stories, is filled with self doubt over his suitability to serve as vessel for his god's will.  Meanwhile is pulled in different directions by competing factions who either see his faith as something to use for their own profit or a symbol to rally people to their own ends.   Karic has to struggle to become a Templar in order to achieve the purpose laid upon him and free his people.  While Leito has to struggle to maintain his faith and the faith of those around them, to keep them from turning on each other if nothing else.  Both these struggles are small pieces of larger battles around them, many of which were started before either of these mice were even born and are propelled by forces that will be present when both of them are laid down to rest.  This really helps make the whole thing seem more real.  While Karic and Leito both provide a face to what is happening to their society as a whole, it remains clear that their own struggles are symptoms of greater problems and overcoming those personal issues is really just the beginning for both of them.  While this is their story so far, there are a large number of other characters, such as the Rat Captain Tosk, the Templar Cassius and others.  While well done, these characters are clearly players in Karic and Leito's story.

The world of Mice Templar is drenched in deep myth, like Black Anais the witch, to the tales of the wars between bats and owls, even the existence of night and day take on mystic significance.  The world and the story blend together elements from Arthurian myth, the Old Testament, and Norse myths to create something new but solid feeling.  So I have to state that I think Mr. Glass and Mr. Oeming have done a fine job of world building and making characters to inhabit the world they made and to tell a story of faith and struggle.  There were parts I found somewhat questionable, for example I'm not entirely sure what Pilot the Tall thought he was going to accomplish and Cassius doesn't seem to have a lot of self control. Additionally the book ends just short of what I could call a complete story, which knocks it down a notch in my view. That said, I'm interested and hoping to get to Volume II soon.  I have to admit that when I picked up the book, I thought I would be looking at a copycat of the comic Mouse Guard but this book is a completely different story on many levels. It's more mythic and tied up in themes of faith and belief.  The core of this story is the struggle of faith in trying time. I give Mice Templar by Bryan Glass and Michael Oeming a B+.  Give it a try.

Next week, we return to Cyberpunk with Snowcrash and then I venture forth to Ready Player One.  Keep Reading!

This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.

Altered Carbon (netflix series) created by Laeta Kalogridis

Altered Carbon (netflix series)

created by Laeta Kalogridis

  Altered Carbon (netflix series) created by Laeta Kalogridis Since this is only the 3rd time I've reviewed something that isn't a book and the second time I've looked at an adaptation. Let me explain how this is going to be set up. I will be discussing Altered Carbon the series, both how it works on it's own as a series and how it does as an adaptation. As such this review will have two grades. One on how good a television series I found it to be and one on how faithful and good of an adaptation it was. First we'll be tackling how it stands on it's own, let's start with the series creator. Fair warning there will be some minor spoilers below. You are warned! Laeta Kalogridis was born in Winter Haven, Florida in 1965. She would graduate college from Davidson College in North Carolina and end up in the UCLA school of theater, film, and television graduating from there with an MLA in screenwriting. Before that she had a brief flirtation with being a lawyer in college before deciding to become a screenwriter (Editor’s Note: She wanted something stable, dontcha know). Her first big fight was for a script rewriting class in UCLA (that at the time did not exist), where she learned to keep pushing if she really wanted something. She didn’t get the class but did get an independent study program that got her what she wanted. It was while in that independent study program that she actually ended up selling her first script, a Joan of Arc film titled In Nomine Dei but it was never filmed. Since then she’s worked on a number of projects from X Men, to Birds of Prey, Avatar, Alexander, Shutter Island, and Terminator Genisys. She is the lead screenwriter and one of the producers of Altered Carbon. 

 Altered Carbon takes place hundreds of years in the future. Space exploration turned up evidence of an extinct alien civilization that had spread across the stars. Reverse engineering their technology led to, among other things, the creation of the stack. A device implanted in your neck that copies your mind digitally, allowing your personality and your memories to be transplanted into another body. This allows for what is practically immortality, as you can move from body to body as age, accident, disease, or violence overtakes it. We also discover a means of Faster than Light communication (but not transport) which means your mind in a digital form can be beamed across the lightyears to another world. Slower than light ships are sent out to create colonies on dozens of worlds and more colonists are sent via this communication system called needle casting. This could be used to create a Utopian lifestyle especially with the creation of VR and AI systems. Instead humanity has found itself increasingly dominated by a class of super rich immortal degenerates called Meths, after Methuselah, the figure in the Bible. Because life and death are now rendered cheap, after all if you kill someone, as long as their stack isn't damaged they can always be brought back, the elite classes increasingly treat them as commodities. Meanwhile the average person is lucky if they can afford to bring back dead family members for the holidays and those who qualify for a new body through government programs can and will end up in anything (Editors Note: Yay for seven year old murder victims stuck in the bodies of eighty year olds! This system seems set up to maximize body dysphoria and existential angst for the working classes. I’m writing in red right now, you can guess how I feel about that, dear readers <sings the Internationale>.) [I would like to remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editor and this review does not condone communist revolutions]. As prisons sell the bodies of their prisoners while they serve their time simply having their stack sit in a drawer. To put it bluntly the system has clearly gone out of control and only works for a small elite and their favored servants while the common people are fighting for scraps. 

      Meanwhile Neo-Catholics, a fundamentalist sect, renounces the use of stacks, calls being re-embodied (called resleeving, as bodies are called sleeves) a mortal sin and demands that they be left dead, even in the case of murders. As you can imagine that makes Neo-Catholics popular targets for murder and other terrible crimes. Crimes that can't be solved because the law forbids bringing back anyone who is formally coded as a Neo-Catholic. A recent attempt to pass a law making it mandatory for murder victims to be re-sleeved and testify in their own murders failed and there is both relief and anger in the streets and with some people the question of who benefits from this lingers. 

        Into this wakes up our main character Takeshi Kovacs, a man with a complicated past. A man who lost everything over 200 years ago. A man who is considered one of the most dangerous criminals alive. He was a member of the military, but deserted and joined a rebellion led by a woman named Quellcrist Falcon. Trained to be a member of her elite force, named envoys. Kovac fought a doomed battle to bring down the system and watched everyone he knew and love killed for it. He is brought back to a life he's not sure he actually wants by Lauren Bancroft. A man of insane wealth, privilege and influence who was found dead, his stack blown apart along with the rest of his head. However, Bancroft escaped death due to a modification in needlecast technology, where a copy of your stack can be sent remotely to a computer and updated at set intervals. For Bancroft it was every 48 hours. He was shot right before his backup. The police were happy to call it a suicide. The deal Bancroft offers is simple, Kovacs will investigate Bancroft's killing, using resources from the vast fortune that three centuries can provide. If Kovacs can discover the killer and the reason behind the murder, then he gets a pardon and millions of dollars. If he fails, he goes back on ice. Unfortunately for Kovacs, the world he's woken up into is full of enemies both within Bancroft's own family and without, as everyone from the police to the crime world keeps trying to convince him to drop the case. Additionally another murder keeps popping up as he investigates, that of a girl named Mary Lou Henchy. A girl who was, bluntly, a whore and who died by falling out of the sky from nowhere. On top of that Police Lt. Ortega is practically stalking him for reasons that need to be figured out as Kovacs gets deeper and deeper into the mess and finds himself following a trail of bodies that the Bancrofts left in their wake and the damage that the Bancroft family has done to each other and to the innocent people around them. He's also gonna have to figure out whose body he's parked in because that seems to bring a bunch of issues all on it's own. 

      There are a number of themes running through the series.  Through Quellcrist, we're told that the issue is immortality. That with immortality it is inevitable that a small group of increasingly old people will own everything and do as they please. That immortality also inevitable leads to immorality is another message of the show. Every meth character is shown as degenerate in one way or another, losing their empathy for other people as they increasingly believe their age, wealth, and power sets them apart. This actually works better as a metaphor for class conflict. We have one class that controls everything and gets everything, including immortal life and other class that has been reduced to a commodity, their very bodies and lives bought and sold for amusement (Editor’s Note: Karl Marx would call this the ultimate manifestation of alienation, as now the working class is alienated not just from the value of their labor, but from their own bodies. Stripped of everything that they might consider theirs.). This is also supported by the running theme of violence against women in the show. It's interesting to note that the two most powerful women in the show Miriam Bancroft (Lauren's wife) and Reileen Kawahara have their power because of men and the victimization of other women. One of them for the most part turns a blind eye to such things, the other one actively aids and abets it in order to profit. Violence against women is centerpieces in the show as an example of a degenerate system and what happens when people are allowed to act out their darker impulses. There's plenty of violence against men of course. Men die in job lots in this show but for the most part men aren't shown as victims, as most of the men who die, do so because they're trying to kill someone else. There are innocent male victims shown, I want to state that for record but it's my view that the show pays much more attention to the innocent women who are turned into commodities and lined up to be butchered, often for the most trivial and petty of reasons. That said, it's not entirely one way, to give an example, when captured and tortured, Kovac is allowed to keep his pants and his dignity on screen. The woman who was killed for trying to help him is cut apart as naked as the day she is born and not allowed much in the way of dignity or anything else. So this may come down to where you're focusing your attention.  

      The show becomes a struggle for Kovac not just to discover the truth of Bancroft's murder and earn his freedom but to create some justice in the world he's found himself in and win some dignity for the many victims strewn in the wake of the monsters who run it. As you might imagine the show earns its R rating and I have to strongly suggest that you don't watch it with the kids around, as there's a lot of nudity, blood, violence and disturbing imagines. However, Altered Carbon doesn't depend on it's shock value, the shock value is there to serve it's plot and characterizations. It has a good solid plot and rather good characters from the always fun to watch Poe, the AI running the hotel that Kovacs makes his base of operations to Lt. Ortega the fiery young lady trying to wring out justice by main sheer willpower and brute force if needed and the Elliots, a local family scarred deeply by it's contact with the Bancrofts. There are a number of amazing actors here as well, Matthew Beidel deserves recognition for playing three different people in body and making them all distinct in voice tone, word choice, and body language. Chris Conner as Poe was amazingly fun to watch. Dichen Lachman also stole the show in many of the scenes she was in and I really enjoyed Martha Higareda turn as Lt. Oregta. I thought Josh Kinnaman did good work as well as Kovac but a number of the people above were just stellar. 

       Altered Carbon is an enjoyable show but held back by it's overly black and white treatment of human society and at times the lack of trust in its audience. Things are turned up to 11 so we can understand that we're supposed to consider all the Meth's bad people. This undermines my suspension of disbelief and I find it hard to believe it's their long lives that does this to them. There are plenty of wealthy people we've caught acting like psychopaths both in the past and in the modern day and they didn't need centuries to reach levels of insanity that turns a man’s stomach. Honestly I would argue the issue is a system that rewards acting like a sociopath with wealth and power. If your upper levels are full of people who could only get there because they were willing to use people like things to get there... Making them immortal will of course result in a bunch of immortal sociopaths. Additionally I don’t think you need to turn it up to 11 for the average watcher to get that these are terrible people so I feel they failed to trust their viewers. That means I can't give it an A or an A- in good faith despite how much I enjoyed it. Altered Carbon as a television gets a B+. I do recommend it as long you know you're watching some decidedly family unfriendly Cyberpunk.

     Now for it as an adaptation. Massive changes were made, a number of these were good changes or just didn't matter that much. For example Lizzy Elliot in the book is a young blonde woman who attracted Lauren Bancroft because of how much like his wife she looks. In this show she's mixed race, with a white mother and a black father. While that does undermine Bancroft's behavior slighty, it's not that big a deal, as men can be attracted to more than one type of girl in looks and personality and it's possible that Lizzy reminded Lauren of his wife through her personality or something else.  So I'm willing to give that change a gimmie.  However the Elliots have their role in the story massively expanded. In the book Lizzy never appears on screen spending the entire novel in VR. Vernon, the father of the family appears once and Ava, the mother of the family has her  role remain more or less the same in length and importance but changed by having her cross-sleeved into a man's body. I'm decidedly neutral on those changes.  They don't hurt anything but I'm not wildly excited about them maybe because I never really got attached to any of them. 

      A good change I feel was bringing the Bancroft's children on screen. Isaac never shows up in the book but in the series he's a recurring character and shows how Bancroft and the existence of his generation keeps their children trapped in a permanent adolescence. As they are never allowed to move forward and assume their own responsibilities but will always live directly under their father's hand. I regard Isaac with a mix of pity and contempt with the pity increasing and the contempt lessening as the series went on as it became clear that Isaac was more then the angry spoiled brat he appeared to be. Miriam’s character is actually dialed down a bit I feel. In the book you pick up real quick that there’s a psychopath hiding behind those pretty blue eyes but much of that is removed in the series, perhaps to make the final revel more shocking. Another great change is the expanded role of Ortega and her family. Her family doesn't appear in the novel and Ortega actually isn't given that much time on screen. In the series her role is massively expanded and her family serves as a viewpoint on a society that Kovac can't give us because he isn't a member of it. He's outside of society, not interested in joining it and his investigation pushes him to the fringes of society.  Instead we have a family who is living a decent if not wildly comfortable life as members of society and we see their positions and thoughts on the issues affecting their lives and times. We see how they struggle with the idea of the stacks and what they mean for their belief in the human soul. That said, I found Ortega's Mother's theology to be just flat out heretical and she would have been banished from my table for something so... Sloppy and lacking in faith in the Lord Almighty. She suggests in the show that it's possible that the Devil created the technology to lead humanity astray. My reply is that the Devil cannot create! To suggest otherwise is to place him on a level with God which is blasphemy. That part really stuck in my craw, in what was otherwise a very interesting scene that is nothing more than a family dinner.  To be fair it is a stance I've run into before but I always find it infuriating, we're a monotheistic religion folks, quit trying to make Satan God's equal (This of course only applies to my fellow Christians). On a side note, the change I like most? Is Poe. In the novel the hotel is called the Anderson and really doesn't have a distinctive personality. Poe through Chris Conner drips with personality and charm and I really enjoyed that.  In fact I liked the expansion of the AI's in general.  In the novel we don't hear much from them but seeing their discussions in the television series was interesting if at times chilling.  

     On the other hand I am not wild about the changes to Kovacs’ backstory, gone is his membership in the gang world of Harlan's world (that's passed off to his sister, who never appeared in the book) and in the books Envoys are a government created armed force to suppress rebellion and re-engineer problematic governments for the Protectorate. Additionally a lot of the Envoy's more terrifying but subtle abilities are gone and replaced with things that really don't cut for me. With the Envoy's becoming a maligned terrorist organization from centuries past, we lose a first hand look at just how out of balance this system of government and control has become. Again everything is pinned on the Meths with the message of ‘if they would just go away and die everything would be better’. Which is frankly too simplistic. This ties into the massive change in Quellcrist in the series. In the book, Quellcrist is a historical figure for Kovacs, but as of Altered Carbon he never met her. Additionally from what we see in the novel Quellcrist didn't preach an anti-immortality message but a message of overthrowing corrupt authority and refusing to bow to oppression and exploitation. Making the relationship between them a personal one is again taking away the subtly and going for a more black and white presentation of Kovacs as many of his more unpleasant personality traits are offloaded onto his sister. This turns him into a more heroic character and I don't like that. Kovacs in the book is brutal, violent in the extreme, and willing to do awful things to achieve his goal. Kovacs is also willing to do good things if it will achieve his goal and in fact would prefer to do good things but feels that the system won't let him. He's a man who’s frustration with life and his own constant exploitation has led him to buy into the belief that the only way to win is to be meaner, harsher, and harder than the other guy and he hates himself for it. A lot of that self hate is because he knows much of the blame for this is his own terrible life choices. The show's Kovacs is more sympathetic because he's suffering from survivors guilt and alienation as he has woken up in a world that honestly has no place for him. While I don't dislike the show's Kovacs, but I think the book is a more compelling character because he is in large part responsible for what he has become and how he deals with that is a character arc that the show won't be able to follow. Meanwhile I've seen poor heroic man suffering from alienation and survivors guilty enough times that I don't feel there's anything new to see here. So if you thought Kovacs was incredibly violent and brutal in the show? He's really toned down honestly.

    There are also characters that were removed completely such as Trepp, who is a mercenary for hire who has lived a long time herself. In fact, in the book Kovacs kills her the first time they met. Trepp doesn't remember that since that happened in-between backups and accepts it philosophically responding that if Kovacs could kill her, she likely deserved it but that was a different Trepp and it's the here and now that matters. She then proceeds to take Kovacs out to party, get high on drugs, and discuss everything from kittens to literature. I thought Trepp was incredibly fun as a character and provided a counterpoint to how Meth's treat immortality. Showing that there was more than one way to be an immortal. Her removal is another step in making the setting and the story vastly more black and white than it really needs to be. I can understand why they did because she does undermine the idea of a class of immortals as the problem in society but since I failed to buy that theme so I'm left missing her presence in the plot. Of course her professional amorality wouldn't work very well with Kovacs in the show so I suppose that’s another reason she had to go. Lastly is Reileen, who in the show is Kovac's sister. In the book she's a crime lord that Kovacs briefly worked for and loathed as a terrible person. Making Reileen his sister is actually one example I think of where the show makes things a bit more complicated and provides extra depth. I could believe in Kovacs struggle to try and find a way to save his sister from herself and his utter despair at realizing that he was too late and might have always been to late. Reileen is shown as a truly monstrous person, however you can see in the show that she was molded into this monster by society and the system of government and economics that she found herself in. She was an orphan, who was unknowingly betrayed when Kovacs joined the Protectorate forces on the condition that she be cared for. She was instead sent to the Yakuza who turned her into a cold blooded killer. When she found her brother again, he starts running off on suicide missions to save a society she really can't give a damn about. After losing him, she fights for safety and really only knows one way to do it: on top of everyone's else bodies. The show Reileen is honestly more tragic and human in a lot of ways even if she does deserve death... For everyone's safety at least. 

      It's that removal of subtly and the introduction of the immortality bad subplot that really drags this down as an adaptation. That said if you're a fan of the book, the series isn't going to enrage you but a lot of it is going to center on how you feel about the theme of immortality itself being the problem and the removal of most of the gray in the story. For me, as an adaption Altered Carbon gets a C+. I'm used to a lot worse but that doesn't mean this was a great adaption. Let me note that doesn't mean it's a bad show (see the grade I gave above) as this is the grade on how true an adaptation from book to screen it was. So next week a brief break from Cyberpunk as we take a look at Mice Templar. After that we jump right back in with Snow Crash and then, we're gonna look at Ready Player One. The book and the upcoming film. Keep Reading!