Digital Sextant

Altered Carbon

by Richard K. Morgan

I read this book for the first time a few years ago, and am reading it again along with my science fiction reading group.  Altered Carbon tells the story of super-soldier (envoy) turned criminal Takashi Kovacs, roped into working as a private investigator back on Earth.  It’s got all the classics of hard-boiled detective stories, including corrupt police, sexy dames, wealthy assholes who believe themselves better than everyone else.  It’s also got the yummy meat we expect from good SF: a bunch of cool ideas and a solidly-conceived world.  Morgan’s Earth exists in a post-singularity world where people carry “stacks” implanted in their spines that hold their consciousness.  The wealthy move from body to body (called sleeves) and can ultimately live forever.  The poor hope they can afford sleeve insurance to get a new body when the old one is killed.

A few other thoughts:

• Like good classic hard-boiled stories, there are a lot of players with different motivations running across our hero’s path.  He gets pulled into fights that aren’t his and finds himself trying to keep several balls in the air.
• The “neurochem” idea of heightened reflexes and computer-assisted battle tech makes for a nice addition to the usual brawling such characters inevitably end up doing.
• Morgan doesn’t shy away from the more grim aspects of the world: people who would lose the bodies they have on storage to higher bidders, criminals stored outside of their bodies might be “sleeved” back into different ones, murder has two flavors now, organic damage and murder–the latter being the destruction of someone’s stack, and carrying a much higher penalty.
• The idea that in the far future we would just beam in and occupy another body fits much better than physical interstellar travel.
• The book toys with “multiple sleeving,” in which more than one copy of a person is loaded into more than one body.  It’s illegal but pretty interesting as a concept.  One character partners with himself to perform assassinations; another spawns a harem of herselves for sexual play.

Like most classic hard-boiled stories, the grim circumstances in which the wealthy use and abuse the working class go unchanged, and the detective can only make a little dent in the villainy.  The larger evils remain unavenged.