Summary: From Publishers Weekly
This fast-paced, densely textured, impressive first novel is an intriguing hybrid of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Norman Spinrad's Deus X. In the 25th century, it's difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is "digitized" and from which-unless the stack is hopelessly damaged-their consciousness can be downloaded ("resleeved") with its memory intact, into a new body. While the Vatican is trying to make resleeving (at least of Catholics) illegal, centuries-old aristocrat Laurens Bancroft brings Takeshi Kovacs (an Envoy, a specially trained soldier used to being resleeved and trained to soak up clues from new environments) to Earth, where Kovacs is resleeved into a cop's body to investigate Bancroft's first mysterious, stack-damaging death.
© 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author: Brian Wilson Aldiss was born in East Dareham, Norfolk, in 1925 and has written over 40 novels and over 300 short stories, making him one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. His first work of science fiction was Non-Stop (1958) and he won the Most Promising New Author award at the SF convention the following year.
In 1962 Hothouse won a Hugo award given by the World Science Fiction Society and in the seventies he explored the experiences of a young soldier in The Horatio Stubbs Saga novels. With Frankenstein Unbound and Moreau’s Other Island he paid tribute to two founders of SF - Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells. By the time of the release of the well-received Hellinconia sequence he had become one of the most prominent British SF writers.
Since 1961 Aldiss has edited anthologies including SF Horizons and has regularly reviewed for the TLS as well as numerous newspapers. Other works include a history of SF, Billion Year Spree, an autobiography Twinkling of an Eye and some poetry. In 1999 he became A Grand Master at the Nebula awards given by the SF and Fantasy Writers Guild for his lifetime achievements in SF writing.
Analysis:
The ontology of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon is presented toward the end of the novel in one of the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs’ memories of his training to become a U.N. Envoy (Envoys are entrusted, through a combination of military and Eastern religious training, to establish order in the colonies beyond the Earth). It is here that we could say Morgan’s novel can be seen as modern or postmodern; and we remember, for example, with Nietzsche the death of God, or Heidegger’s association of being with time, or Deleuze’s emphesis of “becoming” over being.
The trainer, Virginia Vidaura, tells her class: “Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done . . . But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do not rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating, and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. Some of you have served in Vacuum Command, and will no doubt think that out there you have confronted existence vertigo . . . I promise you that the Zen moments you may have enjoyed in hard space are not much more than the beginning of what you must learn here. All and anything you achieve as Envoys must be based on the understanding that there is nothing but flux. Anything you wish to even perceive as an Envoy, let alone create or achieve, must be carved out of that flux.”
Despite the fact that the above thought may be contradictory (how can “flux” be thought of as “Truth,” if truth is a statement of what is objective and unchanging? Perhaps Nietzsche was correct when he said that with the death of God there is also the death of truth. But this should not overly concern us. We should not expect philosophical rigor from artists, even science fiction writers), it will be the special case of flux as it relates to human identity that will concern us. What Vidaura calls the “incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory.” The “carbon” here is the “altered” carbon of the book’s title.
Flux undermines the notion of human identity. If the being I am at this moment in its self-chosenness is different from the being I was in the past, or is still the same through an act of re-creation, repetition, then the question of how I was “originally” becomes meaningless. We may think we have entered upon a contradiction when we think to ask: who is the “self” when one speaks of “self-chosenness”? But the fact that I may choose my self, indicative of myself as a free being, indicates that there is no self. Or, to put it another way, the self is a nothingness (that is, a “no-thing”; not an object). This is the point Walter Kerr makes in his study of the comedians of the Silent Era, The Silent Clowns, in speaking about Chaplin’s character, the Tramp (though not really a tramp): “The secret of Chaplin, as a character, is that he can be anyone. That is his problem. The secret is a devastating one. For the man who can, with the flick of a finger or the blink of an eyelash, instantly transform himself into absolutely anyone is a man who must, in his heart, remain no one.” Or, as Kovacs himself considers the ego: “Suppose you know someone, a long time ago. You share things, drink deeply of each other. Then you drift apart; life takes you in different directions; the bonds are not strong enough. Or maybe you get torn apart by external circumstances. Years later, you meet that person again, in the same sleeve [that is, body], and you go through it all over again. What’s the attraction? Is this the same person? They probably have the same name, the same approximate physical appearance, but does that make them the same? And if not, does that make the things that have changed unimportant or peripheral? People change, but how much? As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing, Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change.” Chaplin’s power as an artist was that, here, he was revealing the human condition to his audience. Morgan attempts, through the genre of science fiction, to perform the same act.
How does Morgan reveal this nothingness and flux of identity in his novel? We have already received a hint about this when Vidaura spoke about the “incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory.” What Vidaura is speaking about here, to use a traditional word which must be divorced from its ancient associations, is the “soul.” In Morgan’s world, the soul, called a “stack,” resides at the base of the skull. This “receptacle,” an “impact-resistant casing . . . barely the size of a cigarette butt,” allows for the possibility that upon the damage or death of the body it may be removed and placed in a new body (or a clone of the previous body, or a robot). This process is called “sleeving.” It is even possible for the persona to be divided and set in two separate bodies. Or the ego may simply be stored. By the way, though it appears that Morgan is subscribing here to the archaic doctrine of Dualism (which has been revived by those who support a strong Artificial Intelligence position), in truth he is not. Morgan subtly implies that a stack in storage, though certainly a “recording” of memories, is only potentially a person. For this individual to be actual, the stack must be within the context of a body. In the novel, Kovacs, who has fallen in love with the character of Kristin Ortega, is at one point sleeved into another body. When he encounters Ortega, Kovacs knows that he loves her and should be experiencing feels of desire. But these feels are absent. The reason is because eros, as a feeling, can only occur in a body so physiologically organized. Outside a body, feelings are meaningless. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty asks about how objects in the world carry importance for us; Kovacs’ love for Ortega, for example: “We must discover the origin of the object at the very centre of our experience; we must describe the emergence of being and we must understand how, paradoxically, there is for us an in-itself.” This leads us to a consideration of the body: “Let us consider it [experience] then at work in the constitution of our body as object, since this is a crucial moment in the genesis of the objective world.” And further: “It will be seen that one’s own body evades, even within science itself, the treatment to which it is intended to subject it. And since the genesis of the objective body is only a moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it the intentional threads linking it to its surrounding and finally reveal to us the perceiving subject as the perceived world.” This is how Merleau-Ponty constitutes the body as a necessity for a subject and that subject’s interests.
What is Morgan’s point here about the possibility of identity? It is just this. Identity is a possibility. I would maintain that Altered Carbon wishes to draw our attention to the fact that since the ego is a non-object, always subject to the possibility of change, it is always possible for us to choose who we are. Indeed, in Morgan’s world the challenge of re-forming our being is clearer than in our own world. This is one of the values of fiction. Heidegger once spoke of death as the “end of possibility.” Until death occurs for us, which in Morgan’s world, given one’s financial resources, is less of a possibility, our being is always open to a re-making. To put this another way, every moment for us is a possibility of rebirth. Note how Morgan begins Altered Carbon proper: “Coming back from the dead can be rough.” This makes of the novel a kind of “coming of age” story. But for Morgan this “age,” this stage of becoming a mature being, is to be associated with one becoming a “moral” being. For meeting the challenge of how one is to be in the world is, ultimately, a moral choice.
The question of how one is to constitute one’s self is one that Kovacs has attempted to answer. This is the reason that Kovacs’ place in the novel as the protagonist also places him as the novel’s moral center. We have already heard that Kovacs previously held a position as an U.N. Envoy. The Envoy’s mission to maintain order in the colonies beyond Earth was, as it were, a kind of “open ended” or “unlimited” order. That is, just about any violent means were permissible for carrying out this order. In fact, the Envoys are specially trained, both physically and psychically, in the use of such unlimited violence. As Kovacs tells us: “When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking-order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.” Kovacs, for whatever reason (but since Kovacs demonstrates that he is a moral, and therefore, free, being, there can be no “reason” that could stand in a chain of causality), has made the choice to step away from such a life. It is not that Kovacs no longer makes immoral choices. Kovacs recognizes this possibility is still within himself (and, indeed, sometimes will exercise the Envoy training that is still with him). But he is no longer content with himself as he once was. He attempts to act differently. Sometimes Kovacs is in conflict with himself (and in this novel this literally happens); but this is further indication of his change of being.
With Kovacs as the moral center of Altered Carbon, all of the other characters are arranged around him. And, to the extent that they are characters who, like Kovacs, make conscious moral choices, they are deemed as either good or evil. Another way to put this is: those who recognize that reality is flux, and so also is their being, and yet further recognize this as the context within moral choice must be made, are those characters of moral worth. Moreover, it is those characters who attempt to undermine time and establish their identities as unchanging, like “objects,” who are the most evil. At one point in the novel Miriam Bancroft (who, like her husband, Laurens Bancroft, are “Meths.” Based on the Biblical character, Methuselah, who lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, meths are those who have lived for centuries) is told by Kovacs: “Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.” To which Bancroft answers: “Yes, it does . . . But you don’t stop caring. You see it all sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all from draining away.” Now of course this is false. It is only because there is death, that time is continually running out for us, that we value life. Meths are those who possess the most opportunities to exercise the human desire to overcome time and death. And, paradoxically, it is this control which undermines whatever value they once put on life. Miriam Bancroft, besides Takeshi Kawahara (who is also a Meth), is the most evil character in the novel. They are the characters furthest away from Kovacs. Laurens Bancroft, though still a Meth, holds on to some part of himself as a moral being. He is guilty of great wrong through his undervaluing of life, certainly; and yet he suffers shame and guilt. He feels a need to be punished (which he carries out himself). There is one character, however, who is probably more moral than Kovacs; but actually does not belong in Morgan’s moral rubric. This is Kristin Ortega. We must remember that Altered Carbon is about the possibilities of remaking oneself. Kovacs is the protagonist because he has so much to remake. It is only those who have erred so greatly that realize the need for moral revision, what Nietzsche called the “revaluation of all values.” And who can teach us the same. Ortega’s moral failings are not as great as Kovacs’. Indeed, she leaves us with the impression that what evil she has committed has only been in the service of a higher good.
I will conclude by recalling Nietzsche. One way to understand Altered Carbon would be to say that Kovacs draws upon the “will to power,” that free, creative force within us all, in order to remake his life. For Nietzsche, in his The Anti-Christ, this is the way of happiness: “What is happiness?–The feeling that power increases–that a resistance is overcome.”
Henry A. Jimenez
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