topics: |  science-fiction

this is a story (and an author) destined for greatness. not just in the science fiction world where it's already a legend (in just two years), but i would say that even as mainline literature. 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...

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...

can buy diff kinds of insurance - even after dying, you can revive the
stack for a spl occ 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.

--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 = digised human freight; d.h. = digitized human. ]

Excerpts

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.
[why isn't handwriting a part of consciousness?
nicotine dependency is also part of the sleeve, not the download...
but the fact that gravity is different affects the agent... ]

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" [rather parochial for 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.'

[so the new body does not remember anything after that last re-load, which
includes how it was killed, whether it was a suicide or not]

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

[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

---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?'

---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.

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

    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.

---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.'

[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

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