Altered Carbon

Recycled garbage, and I say that with a bit of affection. I say that in the French objet trouvé way. As in: it's sparkly, grimy, fun.

This book is to cyberpunk what Game of Thrones is to a medieval period piece. That is: superficial and indulgently recycled garbage. If you enjoy the trashier tropes of cyberpunk - reflective shades, an Orientalist fetishization of Japan, AIs with snarky personalities, rainy urban settings - then this has it in spades. It also has, as Game of Thrones has, lots of cheap thrills to keep you reading (and I read this in, like, a day): exploding heads and “ropes of blood” (gore!), tons of sex (sex!), and frequent drug use (drugs!).

Like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell and When Gravity Fails, it's also a cyberpunk detective story. Which means we check off all the Raymond Chandler-type PI tropes too, and that includes, unfortunately for our garbage pasta, a lot of sexism garbage: there's virgins and whores (mostly whores), and there's lots of dead women. Sooooo many. Sooooooo many exploited, dead women. There's also a cop lady and a couple ninja ladies, so - er - I guess that's a bit redeeming? Whatever.

Brief plot overview: Takeshi Kovacs is a former super commando dude, now gun-for-hire, who was recently “resleeved” into a new grizzled white guy body, at the behest of a very very ancient rich dude (300+ years?) in order to Solve a Mystery. This is a far future world where humans wirelessly save their consciousnesses to the cloud, and can then, upon death and if they have enough cash, download that consciousness into a new “sleeve” (body). If they're wealthy, they grow clones of themselves so that they don't have to use new sleeves. If they're Catholic, they protest and argue that this sleeving business is totally not kosher.

So, I liked more the urban cyberpunk noir of Blade Runner. I liked more the “resleeving”/body download stuff of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. And I liked more the quoth writings of the sneakily female revolutionary primary document asides from The Dispossessed. So is fun, but it's super derivative and it's standing on the shoulders of giants.

Actually! An interesting examination of this book is how it's basically a recycled Blade Runner, if you had only absorbed the movie's aesthetics (macho Harrison Ford getting bruised by creepy android ninjas, rainy West Coast, damsels in distress) instead of reading the original Philip K. Dick - which is a lot more envelope-pushing and weirder (and more rewarding!). This book had all the face, but none of the - dare I say it - SOUL of cyberpunk. And thus, while I enjoyed reading it, I enjoyed it like I enjoy candy: fast consumption, but kinda gross and no lasting impression.

A better recyclage/objet trouvé, one that has the face and soul of cyberpunk, is the guy that recently trained a neural net to re-create Blade Runner. That's true cyberpunk. And better art! Not relying on the cheap thrills of exploding heads, ahem.