topics: |  science-fiction

Science fiction with philosophical overtones

this is a story (and an author) destined for greatness. not just in the science fiction world where this first novel became an immediate legend. this book was followed by two more Takeshi Kovacs stories - Broken Angels (2003), and Woken Furies (2005)

winner of the 2003 Philip K. Dick prize - a rare feat for a new author.

i would go on further to say that the novel stands out even as mainstream literature. like much other sci-fi, the novel is based on potential advances in biotech, and weaves a broad web reflecting on their social ramifications, how they affect class divisions, and even religion. unlike much other sci-fi, however, the story seems more coherent and convincing, for example, jack vance's live forever (2004) suggests a hierarchy of humans, with a final category of Amaranths, who are immortal, but the story lacks power.

while morgan's tale is technically plausible, it stands out because of its deep sociological and philosophical commitment. at the same time it mounts a transparent critique of many contemporary practices. one group that comes in for considerable discussion are the catholics, whom one character calls "goddamn freaks" who have been "grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years... they've stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries." but fortunately, the Catholics don't believe in storage. When they are put into "storage" they never come back. That's why, despite not practicing birth control, there aren't that many of them.

materialist, monist, narrative

morgan fleshes out the philosophic stance of materialism by suggesting that the consciousness or mind is nothing separate from the brain (monism) and that it is implemented in material terms (materialist). furthermore, the essence of the mind can be condensed into a stack (about the size of a cigarette stub), which is occasionally updated into storage. if you are rich and motivated, you can buy insurance to ensure that in case of severe sleeve damage, your stack can be reinstated, possibly enhanced with cyborg extensions, based on its most recent backup storage. this process is re-sleeving. damaging a stack is the most violent offence.

as it happens, very few people are interested in re-sleeving beyond two lives. further, stacks remain stored and can be revived, e.g., for the purposes of testifying in court; it is these kinds of well-thought out ramifications that lend the text its power.

hardboiled thriller

the story becomes a hardboiled thriller where the hero goes against the evil corporates who are attempting to take over society, with a good bit of sex thrown in for good measure.

the story and writing style cross-cuts across genres, mixing raymond chandler into arthur clarke... hardboiling is invading all kinds of literature - following the footsteps of Haruko Murakami's 1985 Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world - indeed, Morgan also mentions Murakami in passing at one point...

sleeves ane stacks

welcome to the universe of the 25th c., where consciousness - a.k.a. brains - are digitized. The digitization happens via a small device called a stack, implanted at the base of the brain. The body is the sleeve, and you can fit any stacks onto any sleeve - sort of like lego - though they can take a lot of adjusting... killing the sleeve is a serious offence - organic damage, but nothing compared to damaging the "stack", "RD" or Real Death as they call it on old planet Earth; that is true murder.

the rich live on for hundreds of years, keeping spare stacks and clone sleeves updated every now and then so even if the main stack is blown away they can be re-constituted from the update. ... but then there are viruses...

most people don't have the will to keep on living. it's considered good to change one's sleeve at least once, but more than two lives - going through the process of aging again, is often seen as not worth it: "old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business..." (54) Most people go into voluntary storage after two full lives, with occasional temporary re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thin out as time passed and new generations came in without the old ties.

those who live beyond two sleeve-lives must be very rich (sleeves are expensive), but also very tenacious.

these folks are the meths, short for Methuselah (whose days were 969
years) [biblical influence still exists, at least in the language]

virtual torture: telling your stack that you are fitted onto the body of a
    young woman, say, who is highly sensitive to pain, and running you
    through an accelerated pain regime, several hundred years in minutes,
    while you lie in a coffin like enclosure with electrodes... your
    stack (i.e. you) can be driven insane...

insurance against stack death

can buy different kinds of insurance - even after dying, you can revive the
stack for a spl occasion like your great-grandson's marriage...  also, the
stacks can be accessed in virtuality - you can query a witness, for
instance.  only the catholics, who believe that the stack cannot be the
same as the soul, reject re-sleeving, and cannot be resuscitated even as
witnesses.

the various worlds are run by the UN protectorate, which ensures order is
maintained in the various planets.  The rebels have their manifesto in the
writings of Quellcrist Falconer, a revolutionary who lived in Harlan's world
several centuries ago.

at the top of the power structure are the meths who develop contacts and
manage their businesses and connections... toying with other, less important
lives.  despite their age, they do not forget their sex drives - indeed,
they get more kinky with age.  there are whorehouses of all kinds to pander
to them - here you can even go for snuff - kill during sex - and if she's a
catholic, then you can't even call her up as a witness...  most snuff games
are on illegal virtuality software, but there are also suave establishments,
like head in the clouds, that let you go for it.  the snuff whores are all
catholics, of course.  and now that the UN wants to legalize testimony by
catholic sleeves for criminal situations, this is being opposed by all the
meths and the high-flying whorehouses...

sex invades the story at many points, and morgan doesn't pull his punches
in describing some steamy sexual encounters...

the writing is very controlled, letting in bits and pieces of history
half-told stories of envoy troops suppressing rebellions around the universe,
creating a coherent, believable atmosphere - while remaining true to the
storyline. only towards the end, morgan perhaps tires a little and the plot
seems to accelerate with the loose ends proliferating exponentially - but
then this happens in all thrillers.

after finishing it, you are still left to ponder the philosophical
questions of consciousness being captured via media - just as serious
literature should.

philosophical ramifications-

the plot is in line with functionalist thinking, which posits that so long
as the function of a system (like the brain) is preserved, the actual
hardware on which it is implemented has little relevance.  

opposing this view is the argument from sensations (phenomenalism), also
called the "qualia" argument, which says that other organisms will never
know what it feels like to be a bat, although we may completely
"understand" and even replicate the mechanisms of their sonar perception
and behaviour.  thus, a computer may replicate the functions of a human,
but would never be able to replicate "what it feels like" to be one.
(see stanford encyc philo - Qualia)

is the story plausible from neuroscience perspective?  can the states of
1011 neurons (nodes in a graph) and 1015 synapses (edges) be recorded
digitally and subsequently reproduced into some kind of wetware, without
worrying about the sensory receptors and motor actuators at the peripheries
of the system?  

well, it sure would take time to adapt all the synapse chemicals to reflect
such numbers, but it does not seem completely implausible. 

in the story, the stack periodically broadcasts its contents to a secure
storage, so that even if the stack is destroyed, it would be possible to
recreate it.  but in order to do this, it has to first store all this
complexity in a device the size of a "cigarette butt".
Information-theoretically, would this be possible?  here are some
back-of-the-envelope thoughts on the minimal volume of a "stack".  18
liters of water hold 1023 molecules, and a cigarette butt, at 2cm x
1cm-squared - is about 1/106 of that, or 1017.  So if each molecule could
somehow store the state of a neuron or a synapse (unlikely) - then it may
be possible it could just about store 1015 + 1011 data.

furthermore, during the re-sleeving process, one could also enhance the
body by adapting "neurachem" (lighning reflexes) and other improvements. 

like the best science fiction (e.g. arthur c. clarke's childhhood's end 
or Terry Brisson's They're Made Out Of Meat), this book will provoke 
thinking on the philosophical aspects of life.  This book is also relevant
to the philosophy of cognition. 


--vocab
the writing style delibrately introduces terms in hardboiled fashion,
without bothering to tell you till much later;  e.g.
"d.h.f" - after encountering it several times, i had to look it up on the
net.  fortunately i wasn't the first person reading altered carbon, and i
found it at chat page; d.h.f = digitised human freight; d.h. = digitized human. ]


[This review originally written aug 2010, updated 2012, 2014]

Excerpts

Against the distant roar of the maelstrom I heard it. The hurrying strop of
rotorblades on the fabric of the night. [opening page]

it's like trying to throw a net over smoke. [threats to Bancroft]

the re-sleeving experience

In the shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands
over the new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard,
with a swimmer's build and what felt like some military custom carved onto
his nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely.

... There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and
some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn't find
any thing worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up with
you later on and if you're wise, you just live with them. Every sleeve has a
history. ...

I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.

This is always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I've been doing this,
and it still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring
back. It's like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For
the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you
through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float
rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that's
almost tactile. It's as if someone's cut an umbilical cord, only instead of
separating the two of you, it's the otherness that has been severed and now
you're just looking at your reflection in a mirror.

I stood there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. 12

I took the pen and wrote my name in someone else's handwriting next to the
warden's finger.

[a tricky area, and a provocative solution. if handwriting is part of the
body, then that part of the CNS is with the body, whereas the rest of the
brain is in the stack.  so the stack doesn't record (or adapts for) the
spinal neurons (and retina).  this makes some sense, since the muscles
(motoneurons) and sensory neurons are part of the new body.  presumably
things get integrated into the new CNS during sleeving.  but is it possible
to dissect the "mind" part from the "body" part?  How does the old mind
learn to control the new body? ]

nicotine dependency is also part of the sleeve, not the download...
but the fact that gravity is different affects the agent... ]

Harlan's World, I remembered from somewhere, has gravity at about o.8g. I
suddenly felt unreasonably heavy...

I put out an arm and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined
precision that I hadn't noticed before. The neurachem was kicking in.

[Murakami - mentioned on p.15]

Catholics

    'What's Resolution 653?'
    'It's a test case going through the UN Court,' said Ortega shortly. '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.'

[Kristin Ortega, Bay city police Lt, on the Catholics:]
    I hate these goddamn freaks. They've been grinding us down for the best
part of two and a half thousand years. They've been responsible for more
misery than any other organisation in history. You know they won't even let
their adherents practise birth control, for Christ's sake, and they've stood
against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries.
Practically the only thing you can say in their favour is that this
d.h.f. thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity.'

[Catholics don't believe in storage.  When they are put into "storage" they
never come back. That's why, despite not practicing birth control, there
aren't that many of them. ]

Envoy Corps

UN colonial commandos - are "pure mind"s are "crack d.h.f. soldiers"
who are "decanted directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up
nervous systems and steroid built bodies."   They are trained in the
psychospiritual techniques that "oriental cultures on earth had known
about for millenia" 
["the orient" - an eurocentric perspective in the 25th c.? ]

    You can't kill me just by wiping out my cortical stack.'
    'You've got remote storage. Obviously, or you wouldn't be here. How
regular is the update?'
    Bancroft smiled. 'Every forty-eight hours.'  He tapped the back of his
neck. 'Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the
PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz. I don't even have to think about it.'

[but when it is killed and re-instated, 
[the new mind (or body) does not remember anything after that last re-load,
and can't tell how it was killed, whether it was a suicide or not]

'Mr Kovacs, I am three hundred and fifty-seven years old. I have lived
through a corporate war, the sub­sequent collapse of my industrial and
trading interests, the real deaths of two of my children, at least three
major economic crises, and I am still here. I am not the kind of man to take
my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion.

---
In the Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the
underlying resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you
build up difference from the details. 41

stack appearance: the size of a cigarette butt

[the stack taken out of Dimitri Kadmin, professional assassin]
didn't look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and
barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the
microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics
might not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.

It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life
after life, sleeve after sleeve.  You had to have started out different. 54


---

'Do you know what Merge Nine is?' she asked, a little unsteadily.

'Empathin?' I dug the name out from somewhere.
... 
'This sleeve . . . ' She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing
the curves. 'This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura
Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when . . . aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in
my cunt, Mr Kovacs.'

joining the military: upgrading from street brawls

(ch11)
Later on, I upgraded [street brawls] by joining the military; brawling
with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just
as squalid.

people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a
genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh,
you've got automated convenience shopping for basic household items,
mechanical food distribution systems for the mar ginalised poor. But you've
also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets
in food and crafts which people physically have to go to. Now why would they
do that, if they didn't enjoy it?'

'Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity,
sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a
scouting urge. It's so basic­ally flicking human when you think about it.
	- Serenity Carlyle [A blonde marine sergeant who taught him to shop]

[why mandroids (humanoid robots) are rare] 
The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate
functions. Artificial in­telligence, which really works better strung out on
a main­frame, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most
cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand. The last robot
I'd seen on the World was a gardening crab. 

Culture is like smog: you breathe it, and are contaminated (ch12)

    As I dressed in the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged
conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been
reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.
    Psychoentirety rejection, they call it.

they could jack my consciousness into a virtual matrix similar to the ones
used in psychosurgery, and do the whole thing electronically. Subjectively,
there'd be no difference, but there what might take days in the real world
could be done in as many minutes.

    for securing the Innenin beach head, a price well worth paying . . . like
all men of power, when [Gen MacIntyre] talked of prices worth paying, you
could be sure of one thing.
    Someone else was paying.

The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn't eaten red meat
recently.

Crime regions

Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent
criminality in the Licktown area?'

There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.

'Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show
fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred
seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with
incidence of minor organic damage, two hun — '

ch 17

'You come from another place,' said Bancroft broodingly. 'A brash, young
colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition
have moulded us here on earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left
on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were
the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I
was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now, I wonder
if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after
norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid
law. The UN declarations fossilised into global conform­ity, there was a — '
he gestured ' — a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent
fear of what might be borne from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while
the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their
stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.'

Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in
and, inevitably, be contaminated

He'll close up faster than an unpaid hooker's hole.

Understanding day (ch18)

The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had
defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting.

with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who
could talk to them. You know they've told us almost as much about the
Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they
remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.'

Ortega: I figured anyone out of Harlan's World would like it.
TK: Good guess.
[so taste comes with the stack, and not the sleeve?  Seems doubtful.  A bit
later, when he drinks, how quickly you get drunk is a sleeve aspect...]

[Kovacs to Curtis]
When they make an Envoy, ...  They burn out every evolved violence limitation
instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking order
dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they
replace it with a conscious will to harm.  It would have been easier. I had
to stop myself. That's what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An
artifice.

The young men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of
snakes.

coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends
...
I felt myself slide out of her like something being born.
I think she was still coming. 247

[Kovacs to Ortega]
Conscious thought doesn't have much to do with this stuff. Doesn't have much
to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the
psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight.  Put the
rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine
tuning. Sad, but true. 248

The shock of waking up inside someone else's body for the first time is
nothing compared to the sense of rage and betrayal you feel knowing that
someone, somewhere, is walking around inside you. It's like the discovery
of infidelity, but at the intimacy range of rape. And like both those
violations, there's nothing you can do about it. You just get used to
it. 270

They locked together in an embrace that looked set to break the new sleeve's
delicate bones. I took a mild interest in street lamps up and down the
promenade.

---ch38
[Duplicates himself in ch38]
Ryker's sleeve had the air of a man who had battered his way head first
through life's trials...

The suddenly discovered difference sat between us like a third, unwanted
occupant of the room. 321

[Jimmy de Soto had always said]
it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt on any one
occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking blended.

my head cleared from foggy to the unbearable brightness of sunlight on a
knife.

It was like being submerged in diamonds.

The shard pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite
the stunner. I dialled the muzzle aperture to wide. At five metres, it would
take down a roomful of opponents with a single shot, with no recoil and in
complete silence. 337

Review by Grzegorz Trebicki

Grzegorz Trębicki: Human Identity In The World Of “Altered Carbon”. in
J.J. Copeland (ed), The Projected and Prophetic (2010).
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/trabickipaper.pdf

	The American SF writer Richard Morgan’s recent “Takeshi Kovacs”
	trilogy (Altered Carbon, 2002; Broken Angels, 2003; Woken Furies
	2005) seems to elaborate on [...]  biotechnical advances and their
	impact on life, death, human identity and individuality, as well as
	political and social consequences of electronic revolution.
	[note: mild error, morgan is british.]

	However, in comparison to many previous works of the genres in
	question, Morgan’s extrapolation remains especially moving and
	convincing.  This is partly because his vision manages to
	successfully background daring technological advances against complex
	psychological, social and economic issues. An unobtrusive yet serious
	critique of contemporary corporate, social and religious systems
	gives it an additional mundane perspective that is absent in many
	similar texts.

	The digitalization of human consciousness and the subordination of
	the whole motif to the social and economic contexts - provides a
	convenient pretext for raising fundamental questions concerning
	humanity. This paper will attempt to analyze the most essential
	elements of Morgan’s vision with a special emphasis laid on how the
	very concepts of human identity and individualityare put to the test
	in the world of “altered carbon”.




Links: 
 * interview : denofgeek.com
 * reviews: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/books/cyberpunk-books/altered-carbon/
       http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/altered-carbon-page-2-quotes/

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