It's hard to say whether what I read in Altered Carbon is so break-out, so edgy, so unique that it's sci-fi crime noir at its finest and most radical ... or if what I read was just a hot, scrambled mess of roughly formed pop-culture ideas shoved alongside regurgitated classic sci-fi elements and presented as something new. I'm not exactly a literary scholar, so if some well-respected authors and some dusty professors told me Altered Carbon represented one of the finest achievements in noir sci-fi in the 21st Century, I'd take their word for it. But seeing as how this was published in 2003, and 13 years later has yet to have a movie or TV show made from it ... I'm going to lean away from that possibility.
The problem is that at any given moment when reading this somewhat bloated novel, I either loved it and found it gritty and dark and compelling, or overly self-assured, vague, meandering and unnecessarily graphic. Altered Carbon presents a future that draws heavy inspiration from sources like Blade Runner and any number of other late 20th century noir sci-fi sources. It models itself after those classic 1950s crime movies / shows with the smoky voiced detectives and alluring lasses and unrepentant criminals. It spins a future of imaginative proportions and interesting ideas, yet never really seems to fully explore any of them, let alone EXPLAIN half of them. It's uncompromising, to be sure, but at some point I wondered if the author was being graphic and grotesque just for shock value and not necessarily to illustrate any point (this would be one of those areas where I can't tell if the novel is brilliant or just crude). Ultimately, I felt like Altered Carbon was a collection of really good concepts that layered upon one another like a glorious cake of imagination, only to have the author give up halfway through, resulting in an unsatisfyingly half-baked creation.
More to the point ... this novel is basically your classic "anti-hero gets recruited by powerful strangers to investigate a crime the cops wrote off as something it's not, and anti-hero ends up getting into more than he bargained for, revealing some nasty truths about those he works with, as well as himself". There's certainly a lot of mystery, a lot of twists and turns, and not all of it because the novel was being clever; some of it is, in my opinion, is simply because the author failed to properly set some scenes or elaborate on the protagonists thought processes. This novel takes place about 500 years into the future, so naturally, a lot of things are different. And while there's much praise to be given to creative works that just dive in and drop you amidst a world of pure sci-fi imagination, it's also prudent to provide clear exposition if you're going to put your story this far into the future. The author uses a grotesque amount of jargon and slang, and never clearly or fully explains all of it (though he does make at least 50 to 60% of it, and most of the important bits, clear). On the one hand, this makes Future Earth feel organic and real, but on the other hand, it meant I couldn't understand half of what the characters would be saying in some select scenes.
The core of the story is intriguing, imaginative, mysterious and certainly makes full use of fiction that the author creates, while still relying upon some timeless plot devices to pull it back down to our reality. While I didn't get all of the insinuations regarding the central story or character motivations, I'll chalk this up to my own literary failings ... for the most part. But about half-way through this novel, after the author had already thrown out a hundred ideas about this sci-fi universe, I started to wonder if he was just throwing out ideas for the hell of it and not because he was being clever or coherent. There was vague mentions of there being evidence of Martian aliens; there were AIs; there was androids, or humans masquerading as androids (I could never be sure); there were flying cars; there was anti-gravity generators; there was FTL communications; there was virtual reality; there was genetically engineered and grown human bodies; there was cybernetic enhancements ... and this is just the easy to relate stuff, and doesn't even touch on the core ideas that build the story, that actually worked.
To be sure, the central premise, that of human minds being backed-up in surgically implanted data cores (called cortical stacks in the neck) was imaginative and original. From this, the author spins a whole series of ideas, most of which are compelling and intelligent. Rather than physical prison or rehabilitation, convicted criminals get their minds taken out and put in "storage" for a number of years. "Real Death" is rare, and only happens if someone's implant is physically destroyed or corrupted; upon death, all but the poor are uploaded into a new "sleeve" (as they call the human body now). There's exploration about how the rich have multiple bodies they swap between, how they can use genetically cultured and vat grown super-human forms, there's some exploration about the issue of telling who is who when a mind can be moved between bodies so easily. There's a plethora of rich and imaginative ideas, too many for me to list here, and most of them are intelligent and work, and several of them set the framework for the central plot conflict. And for the most part, the author follows the "rules" he creates for this sci-fi. That said, probably a good quarter or more of these ideas are spoken of, then discarded and barely touched again, despite how interesting some of them were. In addition, few of the characters really wonder about or explore some of the more lofty concepts, which would have been nice. Given, this is a future that everyone has been living in for centuries and is used to, but the reader hasn't. Occasionally, one of these ideas will be more completely mulled over, such as how Catholics are bucking against the idea of continuous reincarnation through the implants everyone is required to have. And since this is a crime noir story, there's a lot of play with ideas of the future judicial system. And yet, I never felt like any of this was explored to a point of satisfaction.
Wrapping up here, I do also want to touch on the rather explicit nature of this book I mentioned. While I'm no prude, I think it bears mentioning that this novel has two substantive scenes of pornographic detail (like, literally, nothing is left to innuendo or insinuation). The scenes do serve to forward two different plot devices, especially the second one (it's hard to explain, but trust me, it's not there just for the voyeuristic), but all the same, they come as a shock. Counterbalancing this, the author also throws in a grotesque and disturbing torture sequence (made even worse by the unique ideas in this novel). And during the final few chapters and the final climatic scenes, there's some more gruesomeness in both violence and sexual depravity that might churn some stomachs. In general, this story takes an uncompromising look at the worst elements of humanity as framed within the context of a sci-fi future 500 years from now. Since death means less than it used to, violence tends to be casual and unflinching. Empathy is sorely lacking in many characters. Privacy is a thing reserved for the rich. There's some rather nuanced and intelligent exploration of the ideas behind the human body now just being a "sleeve", with the same emotional attachment to an individual as a prized car, so you can imagine that this creates some uncomfortable realities. Collectively, this unflinching approach to a dark future of prevalent and uncensored violence, crime, sex and moral failings forms another of the "is it really clever or just really crude" problems I have with this novel.
So ... the long and short of it is: it's a toss up. Depending upon your tolerance for hard sci-fi and explicit sex and violence and over-use of slang and jargon in a barely relatable future, driven by a crime noir story line ... you might either love or hate this novel. In my case, I'm just kind of lukewarm about it, and glad I finished it. I might eventually cave and read the next book ... I see this is a premier novel, and since many of the ideas were good, if not fully realized, I wonder if the sequel might refine the style a bit. I would be interested to see this as a movie or TV show (the last pages claims it has been optioned for Hollywood and IMDb shows a barely filled entry for "Altered Carbon" with no date).
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