I read Altered Carbon when it first came out. I loved the idea and thought at the time this was one of those unfilmable stories. After all, its the tale of people who hop from body to body the way we change clothes. What actor would want to sign up for a role that would last one or two episodes? What audience could keep track of who was who? Then there was the overarching story with its multiple worlds, its super advanced tech, and its complex morality that no longer looks like morality at all.
Netflix solves most of the problems by ignoring them. The TV show is very good, I liked it a lot, but it’s not exactly like the books. That’s fine, Bladerunner isn’t exactly like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep either.
Like Bladerunner, Altered Carbon puts on the clothes of a film noir detective story. The hero wanders around shadowy streets, asking questions, getting into fights, and wearing a long trench coat. He also carries around a pink backpack very much in the style of Hello Kitty. The bulk of the story sees him trying to solve the murder of a Meth, short for Methuselah. One of the ultras rich immortals who can even survive the destruction of their Stack.
The Stack is a bit of tech that keeps a real time back-up of the human mind. If you happened die in the usually mundane fashion, you can be put into a new sleeve, as they call bodies. The only problem is that sleeves are like cars, the good ones cost a lot of money. Our hero, Takeshi Kovacs, is pulled out of cold storage and given a fairly good sleeve. It turns out to have a history though, and people are not happy to see his face.
The story is filled with nudity, violence, and pure evil. The line that has stuck with me the most was when a minor character is murdered for no reason and his friend yells, ‘You shot him in the Stack you son of a bitch!’ People are given Real Death left and right in Altered Carbon, that is in keeping with the book. You can keep someone from coming back if you burn their Stack, and
Takeshi Kovacs is an Envoy, so killing people, really killing them, is his stock and trade.
This is the only change form the book that really bothers me. Takeshi is an Envoy, which in the books meant he was something along the lines of a Navy Seal or an MI6 Agent or some other flavor of Super Solider. This explains his uncanny skills, why his older sleeves were top of the line, how he’s been all over the Known Worlds. The Envoys were above the law and had access to all the super tech the Government had access to. Here, well, not so much. In the Netflix version, the Envoys were a group of ragtag rebel scum hiding in a jungle. It still worked, sort of, but it was a bit odd.
Altered Carbon was good. I liked everything about it.
