Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon

In my Time and Interactivity Seminar, I met a woman who, like me, was interested in cyborgs, and she and I ended up presenting on that subject on the same day. When we met at the Bad Waitress to talk about what each of us would be presenting, she mentioned this book to me, and loaned it to me at the next class period.

It looks like pure pulp sci-fi, especially its purplish, holographic cover, and I wasn't too sure about it. Plus, it's long--an inch and a half thick, and 534 pages--and so it didn't look like the sort of thing I could just breeze through and return. Still, I was about ready for something new to read, and accepted it.

In good sci-fi/cyberpunk fashion, the story opens right into the fictive world, terms and concepts undefined and left to the reader to work out. It makes for a bit of work at the beginning, but is not overwhelming and is well worth it. Morgan, an educated Brit, weaves a creative, carefully crafted, novel that is part cyberpunk, part noir detective story. His writing is highly literate, and, like the story, is articulate and complex, yet exciting and engaging.

Especially fascinating for me were the concepts introduced and the questions raised: what does death mean if the entire mind can be downloaded and re-uploaded? what does it mean to live in a previously-inhabited body? what about a synthetic body? how would it feel to know someone was wearing your old body? how much of attraction is embodied or chemical?

It might sound a little loopy... but I ended up writing a short paper on it (in relation to Henri Bergson's ideas about memory) and reading it twice. So there it is.