Altered Carbon recently became a Netflix series, so I decided to do it the wrong way round – I watched and then read it. I know there’s more in the series, so I wanted to see if I liked the writing style so that I could explore further.
In the world of Altered Carbon, people’s memories are stored in their “stacks”, in the back of their necks. People’s bodies are a “sleeve”, and those wealthy enough can rent sleeves, clone them, alter them, etc. Those who are poor don’t do so well – if they commit a crime, they might be stored on stack as punishment, while their body can be rented out. A offhand horror in the story is the details of those who get “off stack”, and are returned to life – though not in their own bodies.
The story follows an excessively rich man who hires our protagonist to investigate his suicide – he doesn’t believe he would have done so. (Especially as he is remotely backed up, and has many clones, so can be back to life shortly.) Our protagonist is the interesting one – he is a former UN soldier whose unit specialised in adjusting quickly to different sleeves, and investigating. He had died, but is brought back by our wealthy protagonist, who decided he wanted an expert and didn’t care how long dead he was! He’s in a different body, on a different world, and thrown into the morass of political messing. Major plot points involve prostitution and the Catholic Church’s position on resleeving – their position is that once someone has “died”, they cannot be “brought back to life”, even to testify against their killer (as is standard elsewhere in that world – policemen differentiate for example between crimes of “Organic Damage” which is damage to the sleeve, and Real Death, which is damage to the stack and means all memories are gone.)
The book is really engrossing, but hard to follow at times – by the end I could unravel it all, but there were points throughout where I was confused and appreciated my prior knowledge of the show. I’d still be eager to read more in this story and more with this protagonist. It also raises questions about the separation between one’s body and one’s mind, what constitutes a soul, and how one can trust anyone around you when they could have a different person’s stack driving their sleeve..
