Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon is little concerned with the philosophical implications of its incredible premise, preferring to put all its focus on the political aspects of its fantastic world. Written by Richard Morgan, this cyberpunk novel is not interested in how the characters deal with issues of memory and identity, but in how they manage to resist the constant oppression of a capitalist society that never stops discovering new ways to abuse those elements.

The story opens with the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, being killed by the police. When he wakes up, his conscience is already installed in another body, and his only chance of freedom is tied to a single condition: he is hired by millionaire Laurens Bancroft to solve Bancroft’s own murder.

The narrative takes place 500 years in the future, when an individual’s consciousness can be digitalized by storing their memories in a device located in their spine. The millionaire’s problem is that police found his corpse in his own house, having been shot in the head, and considered the case a suicide. Saved by an old remote upload, as the device that stored his memories was destroyed in the attack, Bancroft refuses to believe he took his own life and hires a private detective to find out what really happened.

Since interplanetary travel happens with the digital self of an individual being sent, downloaded, and then installed into another body on the new planet, military training has shifted to be all about the development of mental techniques in their elite soldiers: their bodies, after all, not only are disposable but also vary widely between battles. Kovacs is one of these elite soldiers, and being in jail has just given Bancroft a way to get to him.

Kovacs, however, shows to be a difficult man to control. At a first glance, he acts like a classic noir detective, with a gruff voice, tragic past, and nihilistic worldview. The character thinks he understands how things really work in the world and sees no hope of them improving any time soon, believing that social inequality and the exploitation of the poor by large corporations are inexorable elements of life. At a certain moment, Kovacs thinks of everything he could say to comfort a certain person, but chooses to remain silent, believing that their pain would remain unchanged no matter what he said: the detective sees no use in certain actions, because he believes that nothing will change.

The character, however, surprises precisely because he cannot maintain this passivity in certain situations, getting tired of so much impunity and injustice. His investigation takes him to the underworld of Bancroft’s city, passing through brothels, illegal fight rings, and clinics of digital torture. The technology that allows someone to preserve their consciousness in the form of a digital self, which at first seems to be a cure for mortality, quickly turns out to be a curse, opening doors to horrible situations: someone buying their rival’s original body just to use it as a personal punching bag is nothing compared to the possibility of someone’s consciousness being inserted in a computer simulation, which can emulate years of constant physical torture in just a few hours. Each act of brutality or abuse that Kovacs witnesses makes him angrier and angrier, with his character arc marking the shift from a passive detective to a bloodthirsty vigilante.

A great excerpt that explains this side of Kovacs is the opening of chapter 15, which channels the best aspects of Anansi’s “angry gets shit done” speech in the TV adaptation of American Gods:

“The personal, as every one’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL.”

Parts of this speech – which, in an ironic touch, is considered a quotation from a fictional book called “Things I Should Have Learnt by Now” – appear amid Kovacs’ thoughts during the rest of the narrative, illustrating the basis of his reasoning while explaining his most impulsive actions. The protagonist knows that he is part of this whole unfair capitalist system and, even worse, that he is working directly for one of those that control it. Kovacs, however, cares enough about things to eventually try to make a difference, even if he thinks that his actions will be ultimately useless.

Embracing its political side with candor, the narrative also places a great focus on the troublesome relationship between technology and religion, especially Catholicism. The first character to express some untoward feelings towards Catholics is a policewoman with a pragmatic worldview, who sees Catholicism as an obstacle to justice. In this world, Catholics are one of the few groups that refuse to accept the resurrection of the individual in another body, believing that the soul dies with the first one, being tied to it. This makes the elimination of Catholic witnesses a recurring practice, because, unlike the rest, they will not return later to accuse their murderers. Religion, therefore, is portrayed in an unfavorable light in the narrative, often appearing as a tool of control and political and economic domination, helping anyone with a hunger for power and criminal intentions. “Bay City public prosecutor’s office want to subpoena a Catholic who’s in storage. Pivotal witness. The Vatican say she’s already dead and in the hands of God. They’re calling it blasphemy,” a police officer complains to Kovacs in a certain scene. It is not surprising, then, that characters frequently attack Catholicism, either directly, accusing their culture of being tied to tyranny, or with constant jokes, comparing the silence of a certain act, for example, to that of a “Catholic orgasm”.

The capitalist problem is also ever-present, adding a mechanism of terrible oppression: with the possibility of being manufactured, the human body completes here its metamorphosis into a commodity. The few great millionaires become practically immortal with their countless clones at their disposal, while the working class often needs to sell its own original body to pay their debts in the hope that in the future they will manage to get a similar one back – a hope that is often frustrated. “Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom please,” Kovacs thinks at a certain point.  In other words, biotechnology in Altered Carbon transforms the act of maintaining a physical identity into a social luxury.

The novel succeeds in the way it builds the main mystery surrounding Bancroft’s death and it’s precisely because it’s much more concerned with weaving these themes into the narrative fabric that makes the final twist than with just surprising the reader with it.

Finally, it is worth pointing out how the story is full of noir conventions, with a cluttered plot, a melancholic atmosphere, and female characters that vary between femme fatale and damsel in distress – although a certain character, fortunately, breaks this pattern, managing to rescue the protagonist and eliminate the bad guys.

Altered Carbon never tries to revolutionize the sci-fi genre, but, with its fascinating protagonist and highly political narrative, it remains a very competent novel nonetheless.

December 01, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on January 15, 2018.