So I just recently finished the book Altered Carbon, on which the netflix series of the very same name was based. I thought it would be deep, meditative, full of intrusive and suspense, and explore the notions of post humanism that the show so eagerly suggested at.
What I instead encountered was a cheap action flick, with a bit of a mystery, some high stakes, but with far less of the world building and thematic denseness that the show managed to bring to the screen.
The writing is good, modern, and so very contemporary, but it is not elegant. the crude first person vocabulary of the protagonist distills a sense of ruthlessness, and perhaps makes it more difficult to relate to the world in which he navigates.
Meanwhile, in the show, we are somewhat detached from the protagonist, which allows us to see in more depth how the world around them works instead of observing a one dimensional narrative. This is sorely missed, where in the book: a dark alley in a dodgy part of town is an opportunity to show off physical prowess in combat is a boastful beat em up, while in the observed cinematic format, it is a scene that instead shows the observers, the npcs, and builds more… welll, lore.
I am not saying that this is a bad book, merely that I appreciated the world building of the show a lot more than the one dimensional perspective offered by the novel. I did, after all, get through the whole thing, but I didn’t get any of the usual sense of awe and amazement that I normally can get from science fiction.
Instead, this was just an action flick, in book form, set in a cyberpunk future where death, at least for the wealthy, doesn’t mean very much.
And that’s where investigating a murder on behalf of the man who was murdered … at least allegedly doesn’t really hold a sense of jeopardy in the same way in which the show takes it to another level,
For you see, in the world of altered carbon, someone’s personality can be downloaded into a new sleeve, slang for a host body, via an advanced microchip inserted in the back of their head. As a result, unless that chip is destroyed, death is merely an inconvenience and a simple respawn.
If that infrastructure was to be compromised…well that is where the book could get very interesting.I do. to plan on reading the sequels, but i might revisit the show. it was very good.