Altered Carbon is a very hit or miss book. It has an interesting theme of memory transference inside a film noir story that combines with futuristic gun action. At the same time it falls victim of a typical grave sin when it comes to science fiction, and that is not creating a plausible setting based on its own in-series laws.
The story is about a man hired to solve a murder mystery in a society where you can change bodies if you are rich enough. The effects such a technology can have on the minds of people are looked into from multiple perspectives, such as driving them insane or becoming cynical, and superficially it seems to be doing a good job at fleshing out the world and its denizens.
If you do not think too much about it, it can be very intriguing. You have this super soldier with brain implants which make him fast and powerful, working as a detective for a rich guy who died a few hours ago, without being actually dead. If you store your memories in a bank, you can create a copy of yourself even after you are dead, without of course remembering what happened since the last time you saved the file that is your brain. It’s well-excused amnesia to hide the truth.
The writing is competent and crafty in its descriptions of terminology and battles. The inner monologues were pretty good at giving us a good image of the mentality of the protagonist. The dialogues were compelling when they were about a war of ideologies on the ups and downs of this technology. Heck, even the sex scenes were detailed without becoming smutty.
The biggest problems are present in the plot, which is full of convenient events that break immersion with illogical motivations and bipolar behaviors. The protagonist in particular is constantly switching between a bad-ass fighter who kicks the crap out of dozens of enemies and charms all the ladies with his good looks, and a hapless teenager with an identity crisis who constantly sobs in a corner and has a bone to pick with the status quo.
The transition from one persona to another is too sudden and comes off as a lazy way of appealing to two very different audiences. One that likes alpha males that shoot first and ask questions later, and one that likes angsty teens who nag at everything and pretend to be victims of circumstance, when they are otherwise mercenaries working willingly for the very system they hate so much. Why isn’t he a rebel or something?
Another issue is the whole memory transfer fuss. Although we are made to understand how it works and how it affects people on a personal level, there is little to no effort in showing how people behave on an interpersonal level. For example, it’s impossible to tell when someone is really dead if he can copy his brain at any moment without telling anyone about it. So every time someone was saying a person is dead for good, there is no way he can be sure about it.
Also, if this is a setting where you can switch bodies, it’s impossible to be sure the person you are talking to is the same as it was yesterday, and yet everyone in the book takes for granted that they are always talking to the same person as before.
Also, if this is a setting where you can copy yourself, there is nothing to stop any military organization from creating an army of clones out of the same one soldier, which should make any security force to be very limited in actual people working in it. Yet look at that, everybody acts as if there can only be one copy of anyone at any given time. And yes, they do mention it’s both illegal and hard to have doubles or more of someone, throughout the first half of the story, only to conveniently make it easy and commonplace in the second half.
Basically, the notions of death and identity should have been a lot hazier. The author is still treating them the same way we do in present time, which makes it anachronistic and immersion breaking. And since it’s the selling point of the whole book, it fails to be anything more than b-grade fiction.
Interesting how TV Show will handle such details.