ALTERED CARBON: neckbeard wish-fulfillment

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .

Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon was a buy motivated by hype, and as happens fairly often with those, it was absolutely disappointing. It’s a cyberpunk novel, with all the tropes and trappings you would expect from such a novel: AIs, human personalities being digitalized, questioning the concept of reality–the usual things that make sci-fi of a certain breed utterly identikit. I’ve this unfortunate soft spot for digitalized humans, though, which I like to blame on the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

The book is considered, by a certain breed of sci-fi fans–the breed, naturally, that tends toward the dudebro side of the spectrum consisting mainly of nerdy white boys who believe themselves brilliant–to be some sort of intellectual triumph. I consider it  one long parade of shit. Shit on a stick thrust into a mound of feces that seethes with maggots. I’ve never read anything this blatantly testosterone-charged, painfully pubescent, endlessly idiotic for quite a while, and I say that as someone who’s read an unfortunate quantity of shounen manga, those with ecchi tendencies even.

Altered Carbon has its roots in noir detective fiction. I don’t know much about that genre, but from what little I do know, I think I’m better off not touching that shit with a ten-foot pole (and the other noir-derived fantasy I read, Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, I also disliked intensely). This Amazon review pinpoints some of the things I find wrong with Morgan’s first novel:

Almost every bit of knowledge or effective action that comes Kovacs’ way is either provided by, done by, or massively enabled by the various women that our hero encounters. Virtually everything he does on his own is either wrong or futile or stupid. Basically, the women he meets fall over themselves to help him out (to be fair at least one wants to kill him)

Apparently this is a noir convention, and seeing that it also pops up in Butcher’s verbal diarrhea, I’ll assume that is true. You see, women don’t just fall over themselves to help him out. They also throw themselves at him and beg him to fuck them senseless. I will be fair and let the text speak for itself (“Merge Nine” is a drug that lets you feel what the other person feels):

She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. “–this is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when… aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr. Kovacs.”
[...]
Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honorable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from… [my hand] was molded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side, and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.
[...]
Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face… Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her.

Blah, blah blah. Well, that was classy. She actually shows up in his hotel room in a leotard. Springy resistance? Keep in mind, this Miriam Bancroft is very old. She’s been resleeved loads of times. And, by drawing on all that experience over the centuries or however long she’s lived, all she can come up with to convince someone is by using sex? That’s it? Granted, the female yakuza boss who’s the real villain of the book is fairly intelligent and is never at any point interested in dry-humping Kovacs, but even then it’s still asinine.¹

The other woman who’s dying to have his cock in her right now right here take me take me is a policewoman (…do authors think that if they put a woman in a law enforcement position or similar, they’re ipso facto a progressive feminist?), as it so happens that the body (“sleeve”) Kovacs is wearing belongs to some guy the woman was in hawt hawt lurve with. The resultant sex scene is roughly of the same caliber as quoted above: juvenile (IIRC they even orgasm simultaneously), and exciting maybe if you’re a desperate teenage boy with no other access to cheap porn. Hilariously, at another point the female yakuza boss screams at one of her hired agents, another woman, for betraying her to Kovacs: (paraphrased) “What did he promise, to eat your cunt for the next decade?”

This leads to another point. Quoting a review:

He’s [Kovacs] supposed to be some sort of renegade super-effectvie super-psychopath as the result of special training and conditioning. However, he seems more like an impotent, gratuitously violent, unpredictabley sentimental thug, maybe someone like Bobby Brown (Whitney’s beau). Everybody in the story, including the viewpoint character, tells us the opposite though. In the context of all the violence and adulation, the reader expects Kovacs to be a smart tough guy, but looking at what he does, how he does it, and why he does it, there doesn’t seem to much support for that belief.

Which is pretty much a Gary Stu in a nutshell, isn’t it? Takeshi Kovacs, our brave brave hero, is a super-assassin-agent-badass trained as the elitest of the elite. He kicks ass. He fucks women like a pro. He blows things up and defeats the baddies. He has cool gadgets and an amazing repertoire of lovingly described weaponry. Basically, it’s like James Bond/Jason Bourne/Commander Shepard. What-the-fuck-ever.² Oh, he’s also got a tortured past (with a dead/currently digitalized lover) and an abusive daddy, or something like that. The usual fare. Every time the plot calls for it, he’d experience a flash of “Envoy intuition” (“Envoy” being their equivalent of super-spy/elite space marine). When he needs to persuade someone, he puts “Envoy training” into his voice. When the time comes to blow shit up, he uses “Envoy training” to make him superhuman. And on and on and on. Seriously? Who let such feces pass through the slushpile? You can replace “Envoy ____” with “magic” and the net result will be the exact same. How is this clever? Remotely plausible? How is this not a blatant, ham-fisted device that exists to aid an author who obviously can’t plot his way out of a small snowglobe?

I’d say the book has some worthwhile ideas, but it doesn’t really. What it has are ideas already dealt with, and dealt with better, in loads of similar works.³ It brings nothing clever, it has no good lines, it possesses no intelligence, it rampages in a predictable pattern of fuck-that-bitch/shoot-that-guy/blow-that-up in the most humdrum way possible, described in subpar prose. It’s dreck that best appeals to men who never grew out of being thirteen.

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[1] But even then, her plans are kind of stupid, and the way Kovacs does manage to get her is part dumb luck and partly that old “oh, super-villains are too arrogant to see their downfall coming” rubbish.

[2] I do not understand the appeal of this crap. Do people actually like this shit? Is there a name for it? Beyond “shitty macho wish-fulfillment garbage” or “lowest common denominator drivel”? Surely there must be a term.

[3] Yes, it even does that multiple-copies-of-me dilemma, though it’s glossed over in a fairly bland way. It has torture porn as part of the mystery, but it’s dull. On that note, the body Kovacs uploads himself into is described thus at first sight, from Kovac’s perspective–

Slim, hard looking, and brown, with the delicately lifted Japanese eyes on the shelf of unscalably high cheekbones, a thick, straight drift of impenetrably black hair like seaweed in the tank fluid. Gracefully flexible with the long hands of an artist, but muscled for speed combat. It was the body of a tech ninja, the body I’d dreamed about having at fifteen, on dreary rain-filled days in Newpest. It wasn’t far off the sleeve they’d given me to fight the Sharya war in. It was a variation on the sleeve I’d bought with my first big payoff in Millsport, the sleeve I’d met Sarah in.

It was like looking at myself under glass. The self I’d built somewhere in the coils of memory that trail all the way back to childhood. Suddenly I stood, exiled into Caucasian flesh, on the wrong side of the mirror.

Kovacs’ current sleeve belongs to Detective Ryker, a blond, blue-eyed man. Takeshi Kovacs himself, I think, was born Japanese (and the protagonist of one of Morgan’s novels, Thirteen, is black). The “Japanese eyes” part is the usual cheap exoticism you would expect from a white writer, and I’m not sure what the sudden “exiled into Caucasian flesh” is doing there, because throughout the entire novel the notion of ethnicity is never touched on and Kovacs doesn’t behave any differently from a western super-spy-badass. Expanded, it might have been intriguing, but as it is this just seems shoehorned.

Oh, and it’s unlikely he’d call those “Japanese eyes,” being Japanese himself. Did I tell you the yakuza boss uses -san when addressing Kovacs, even if she’s speaking English? Despite the fact that most real people don’t do that? I mean, do you slip into the honorifics of your native language while speaking another one? I’ve known quite a few Japanese students. Funny how they don’t call each other -san, -chan, or -kun. They don’t call teachers “sensei,” either, just so you know. Fuck off, you stupid weeaboo dimwad. Yeah, yeah, anecdote not data, but when was the last time you met a bilingual person who dropped random phrases of their mother tongue into English for no reason? Especially when you don’t understand that language anyway?

Also, another thing–the way Kovacs describes the body, I’d have thought he was going to dry-hump it on the spot, but as far as I know Kovacs is straighter than a ruler. Richard Morgan has written fantasy featuring a gay man, though (opinions on his treatment of Ringil’s homosexuality vary, but insofar as that aspect of that book is I thought it was more or less decent).