A Review of Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Title: Altered Carbon

Author: Richard K. Morgan

Publisher: Ballantine / Del Rey

Cover art: It's cool... but it's cool for a movie poster. And this is a book. So if you want to put a frame around it the thing is just swell. If you put it on a bookshelf, it will look hideous.

Length: 384 pages in trade paperback

Rating

4 out of 7 (It's not unpleasant... but it's not really a book. It's more like a screenplay. It has none of the rich pleasures that comes from reading rather than going to the movies.)

Rebuttal

Altered Carbon Explores Nietzchian Amorality by Andy Cavers (freelance submission)

"The plot is thriller-paced, with each and every scene playing an essential role in the narrative, while still allowing for thematic investigation of the nature of good and evil in a world where the rules of life and death have so drastically changed."

--scifi.com, D. Douglas Fratz

It's a bit scary that someone can pass this novel off as an investigation of the nature of good and evil. In fact, this sort of thematic examination is precisely what we find missing in the novel. Protagonist Kovacs is not really fighting/investigating for any particular cause: not good, not evil, not charitable, not honorable. Nor are the people he's working for. Nor are his (many) enemies. Nor are his allies. In fact, there is a complete dearth of any sort of sentimental appeal to quaint notions of honor, moral codes, or even just trying to make the world a better place that drives many of we primitives here in the early 21st century. Rather, everything is subsumed in a wash of self-centered behavior.

"Richard Morgan has re-kindled my enjoyment of science fiction."

--BookLoons.com, Hilary Williamson

It's okay to like this book. Just because we rated the thing a 4 doesn't mean it's a bad book. It's an accomplished book. We think it's okay to like it. We liked large bunches of it. But you know what? Don't try and pass yourself off as a critic if you're going to announce something like this cinematic comic-book/screenplay-in-waiting as rekindling your enjoyment of science-fiction--not when there's so much else going on that is of genuine literary value. It's a mystery thriller set in the 25th century. That's it. If that's all it takes to float your boat, then you've really got to admit you're kind of a shallow reader.

"Morgan's 25th-century Earth is convincing, while the questions he poses about how much Self is tied to body chemistry and how the rich believe themselves above the law are especially timely. (Mar. 4) Forecast: With film rights optioned by Warner Brothers and Joel Silver (The Matrix), this book could itself achieve a kind of immortal shelf presence."

--Publisher's Weekly

When PW is right, they're right. We agree that Morgan's 25th century Earth is "convincing" but it is only convincing--it is not awe-inspiring, enlightening, or even very fun. His concept of "sleeving" is very, very interesting--which is what PW is referring to when they speak of the "self" being tied to the body chemistry--but it is an interesting manifestation of the age-old metaphysical mind-body problem (how can an immaterial soul effect a material body?) and Morgan isn't bothering to break any new ground on this subject. Sleeving is just a very cool way to re-illustrate a very old metaphysical concept. However, it is the case that this would probably make a pretty cool movie though it would take some serious screenplay adaptation to turn it in to something as profound as The Matrix.  

Altered Carbon is precisely the kind of book for which we founded Inchoatus. It's the kind of book that generates a lot of publicity. It's cool. It's slick. It has lots of violence and sex. The writing is actually very tight, very good, and very edgy. It's been optioned by huge Hollywood companies just dying to make a movie out of this thing, which will propel it to the stratosphere of hype and readership.

That's why we're here to tell you: don't believe the hype; this is just an average book.

Morgan founds his book on a pretty familiar concept: that of downloading consciousness in to bodies or machines. This is not terribly innovative--it's done rather routinely on Star Trek and a great many other movies, books, and TV series that often crosses the line in to horror works where spiritual possession is explored. But Morgan does two things very well. First, he embraces the concept in a vice-like bear hug of technological speculation and builds his entire world around the ramifications. Secondly, he gives it one of the snappiest names we've ever come across in all speculative fiction: "sleeving" or "re-sleeving" as the case may be. That is, bodies are "sleeves" and worn like garments.

Some times terms just fit in to place so perfectly that they'll never leave your brain. "Sleeves" and "sleeving" is sheer brilliance as a way of labeling and symbolizing what is going on. That term, by itself, buys this book a ton of credibility.

And "sleeving" makes for very interesting moments in the novel. The narrator, Kovacs, will describe people as "wearing a forty-year old sleeve" implying that the body has nothing to do with the person. There is a particularly striking line where Kovacs--himself re-sleeved countless times as part of his job as an "envoy"--says, "I let my sleeve smoke a cigarette." He implies a total separation of soul and body in a toss-away line that can really resonate with readers.

His society becomes something very interesting where people are consumed with buying insurance policies to ensure their survival in future bodies (sleeves); police and security where death becomes partially meaningless since consciousness can be downloaded back in to a waiting sleeve; and sleeve renting by people desperate for cash or in prison. It's very cool and very beguiling. It's an idea so cool it's obviously worth quite a bit of money to Warner Brothers.

But, like many speculative fiction novels, just having a cool idea doesn't make a great book. At best, it just makes an average book.

Altered Carbon is every bit a very standard mystery novel. After you get past the 25th century sleeving technology (and the obligatory flying cars in what we suppose is a nod to Blade Runner), we have a detective hired by a rich guy with a beautiful wife investigating a strange murder. We get the love interest in the police officer. We get the oppressed and brutalized ingénue. We get a little bit of organized crime. We get an old enemy reborn from the past of the detective. It's all so strangely quaint when you get past the gadgetry and the sleeves. And that's just not interesting.

The closest analogue to Altered Carbon is a very, very similar novel that also generated quite a lot of buzz: Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. Both of these novels are about people inhabiting new bodies in dangerous world where immortality and nanotechnology are not sensational realities but are verging on boredom for the citizenry. Both novels try to reawaken the noir spirit of mystery/suspense. Both feature a hardnosed detective severely trained in matters military coming from another world racked by war. It's almost as if Reynolds and Morgan compared notes as they went along. And like Chasm City, we're impressed with the ideas, the writing, but just not the importance of the novel.

If you find yourself violently disagreeing with this review then you will absolutely love Chasm City and you should go buy it.

Morgan should be commended for his work. He's going to (or has made) a great pile of money. It's an interesting novel that's a fast read and good for a weekend vacation or a long plane flight. It's the kind of thing that'll stick with you for a little while because of the technology allowing you to forget all those utterly forgettable details of the plot. Just don't mistake this for genre-altering literature. It is not.

It could be we just don't like mystery novels. At Inchoatus we have a very definite focus and agenda: we think that speculative fiction--when it's at its very best--is mythic, important, and touches on age-old archetypes. Mystery novels just aren't built to do that. They're insular, self-contained, self-centered affairs that live and breathe on what happened to a very, very small group of people. For example, it's very difficult to compare Altered Carbon to something like Red Mars. In Red Mars, the incidental death of some rich corporate guy wouldn't even register as a blip on something as dramatic and all-consuming as planet terraforming and revolution. But Morgan asks us to read an entire novel about it.

But it's not just that: even mystery novels can have something more to say for themselves. The movie Blade Runner was built as a mystery thriller but had very important things to say about awakening intelligence in androids and the meaning of the word "soul." Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is also somewhat of a mystery novel but also touches on very important themes of how people live and breathe in virtual environments and what information and language actually mean to those societies. Our take is that Altered Carbon is missing these things that flesh out the better works of Blade Runner and Snow Crash. Morgan--in this book, at least--just doesn't run that deep.

If you love detective novels in any sense--be it set in the past, present, or far-flung future--then you'll really like this book. If you enjoy your mystery novels with heavy doses of violence and sex, then you will love this novel. Fans of Philip K. Dick will especially find resonance in this book as will, to a lesser degree, fans of Neal Stephenson's earlier cyberpunk work and William Gibon's Neuromancer. Altered Carbon is darn near the twin sibling of Reynold's Chasm City so if that book did it for you so will this one. Not particularly striking since you can glean all of this from the snippets quoted on the book jacket but in this (rare) case the book jacket gets it right. While we submit that there is a lack of depth in a literary sense in this book it is the case that the concept of "sleeving" is interesting and people deeply invested in concepts of soul versus body will find quite a lot of satisfaction in the subtext. Beyond all of this, it is also very brisk completely self-contained, and reads quickly, which is a welcome respite from a great lot of tomes and chronicles we've had to deal with lately from the publication houses. 

If you hate mystery novels, most definitely pass. You absolutely must have an emotional stake in "whodunit" in order to enjoy this novel. That is an absolute requirement. If "whodunit" is a niggling detail to you and you'd rather explore some of the more philosophical concepts of living in the 25th century, you'd better check out a different author. Also, in a sense, this novel reads very much like it was intended from day one to be seen on the screen. We feel that it may be a far superior movie than a book. Yet reading things that seem more visual than imaginative can be irritating to a class of reader more in tune with, say, Ray Bradbury. If you're in that camp, this is another novel for you to avoid.