Author Topic: Altered Carbon [Spoilers]  (Read 4865 times)

ElectricPaladin

  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 1005
  • Holy Robot
    • Burning Zeppelin Experience
on: January 11, 2015, 08:28:32 AM
So, I don't know if it's really worth it to put a SPOILERS tag on a novel that's how-many-years old, but there you go.

I just finished it, courtesy of Audible, and I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it was a lot of fun. The setting was neat, to the point that I've decided that almost everything that made Eclipse Phase only a mediocre RPG was where they deviated from the Protectorate. I kind of want to take out my FATE Core books and just run a game set in the Protectorate, stealing liberally from the Eclipse Phase corebook for story ideas. I liked the AIs - they were complex, not quite skynet, but not quite WALL-E, either. The Hendricks was an interesting and compelling character, and I appreciated both his plight as an independent AI in a world that was leery of him and the menace of what he represented.

Most importantly, Takeshi is a compelling antihero, and I like how clear it is that he is caught in between everything that makes him human and the things that were done to him to make him an Envoy. Takeshi himself is tragically aware that while many of the people he encounters view him as superhuman, he's really subhuman. He did suffer a little bit from being an unusually self-aware loser, however. More than once, I found myself thinking "jeez, Tak, if you're so smart and know yourself so well, why the hell are you still kicking around leading such a miserable life? Why haven't you settled down, got a real job, gotten some psychological help? But I can accept that this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

I also enjoyed the nods to classic Noir: the world of enormous wealth disparity, the contrast of light and shadow, a world in which good and evil exist, but people are hopeless muddled in their quest to find their way between these extremes, the beauty and fleeting nature of innocence... even San Francisco Bay City as a setting reminded me a lot of The Maltese Falcon. I live in Oakland, used to live in San Francisco and still regularly cross the bridge to get there, and frequently drive through Richmond to get to San Rafael to game, and it was fun to think of all those locations still kicking around in our transhuman future.

On the other hand... man did this story step on a lot of landmines. Let me see if I could remember most of them:

1) You've got a mixed-race main character and you still conspire to make sure he spends the first book being a scruffy white guy who insists on talking in English, even when another Japanese-speaker appears.

2) Your only other major nonwhite character is a total dragon lady stereotype.

3) When your main character is kidnapped and tortured, said torture is incredibly sexualized, and also he's turned into a woman for the duration of the torture, and also when he escapes the torture there are no long-term consequences because of magic brain conditioning. Any one of the above I could have dealt with. Maybe any two. All three really bothered me.

4) Speaking of torture, the entire idea of "Planet Sharia" really squicked me out. I mean, was it really necessary to have an entire planet based on bad Western stereotypes about Islam? And then call it freaking Sharia? Just... so damn transparent.

5) And the Catholics. This one kind of annoyed me, too. It seems that despite the general trend of most religious people to mellow out and embrace tolerance, the future will be full of staunch technophilic atheists and religious nuts. We'll have the icky nonwhite religious nuts will be violent and dangerous, and the safe, whites ones will merely be hapless duped victims.

For both this point and the previous one, it would have bothered me a lot less if either the Catholics or Planet Sharia had been throw-away one-line background elements. I get it, it's not what your story is about, you aren't obligated to make sure to rub me the right way with every element of your setting, but when things like the Catholics and Planet Sharia get harped on as much as they do - especially Planet Sharia, which wasn't even all that important to the plot - I start to feel like I'm being preached at.

6) And finally, as much as I actually really did enjoy the main plot - I'm about to complain about it, but I really did like how Bancroft's semi-suicide was character driven, not circumstance driven, but still ended up tying into the main plot - much like Dresden Files, I am little sick of storylines that could be entirely avoided by sending one of the key players a copy of Screw the Roses, Send me the Thorns. I get it, Bancroft, you're a kinky motherfucker. Do you really think you're the first kinky motherfucker the world has ever seen? GET THE HELL OVER IT.

By the way, one last point - if any of you want to listen to the Audible book, be careful. There's something wrong with the audio quality. It's very deep, rumbly, and a little indistinct. I'm probably going to end up rereading the book this summer, when school ends and I have time to read again, just to appreciate the plot nuances a little better. I kept on losing track of who was doing what and why, and there were so many hookers getting cut up, almost every other chapter. That's another thing that bothered me...

TL;DR version - I liked it, and I'll continue in the series, but with all the hype I was expecting it to be brilliant, but in actuality it was merely quite good, and also tripped on a lot of cultural landmines that left me feeling dirty. I'm curious to read if any of my fellow Escapers and how you felt about it.

Captain of the Burning Zeppelin Experience.

Help my kids get the educational supplies they need at my Donor's Choose page.


DKT

  • Friendly Neighborhood
  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 4980
  • PodCastle is my Co-Pilot
    • Psalms & Hymns & Spiritual Noir
Reply #1 on: January 15, 2015, 11:02:55 PM
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude. I read this when it first came out, I think? Maybe about 12 years ago? I had similar mixed feelings, but generally was glad to have read it. Parts of it I really liked (Morgan's voice is really good and set for SF noir), the protagonist, the tech. Parts of it not so much. All the women want Takeshi, even the ones who hate him - that was a particular frustration. And the mystery (again, it's been years) of who killed Bancroft seemed obvious to me from the get-go, even if the motivation wasn't.

Still, I enjoyed it. I read the second one as well, and liked that it shifted some from noir to more of a military SF angle. Kind of a haunted military SF angle. I like in both books that the violence is extreme, and felt, well, distrubing.

I haven't read the third one yet. I did read Market Forces and hated it. One day I'm gonna check out his fantasy series via Audible, because Simon Vance narrates it, and he has the best voice.

Electric Paladin, have you read Alasdair Reynolds' Chasm City? It reminded me of Morgan's books a little, but in the end worked for me a lot better. Hell, I should give that one a reread/listen at some point.


ElectricPaladin

  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 1005
  • Holy Robot
    • Burning Zeppelin Experience
Reply #2 on: January 16, 2015, 01:40:16 AM
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude. I read this when it first came out, I think? Maybe about 12 years ago? I had similar mixed feelings, but generally was glad to have read it. Parts of it I really liked (Morgan's voice is really good and set for SF noir), the protagonist, the tech. Parts of it not so much. All the women want Takeshi, even the ones who hate him - that was a particular frustration. And the mystery (again, it's been years) of who killed Bancroft seemed obvious to me from the get-go, even if the motivation wasn't.

Still, I enjoyed it. I read the second one as well, and liked that it shifted some from noir to more of a military SF angle. Kind of a haunted military SF angle. I like in both books that the violence is extreme, and felt, well, distrubing.

I haven't read the third one yet. I did read Market Forces and hated it. One day I'm gonna check out his fantasy series via Audible, because Simon Vance narrates it, and he has the best voice.

Electric Paladin, have you read Alasdair Reynolds' Chasm City? It reminded me of Morgan's books a little, but in the end worked for me a lot better. Hell, I should give that one a reread/listen at some point.

I haven't - I'll put it on my list.

Captain of the Burning Zeppelin Experience.

Help my kids get the educational supplies they need at my Donor's Choose page.


eytanz

  • Moderator
  • *****
  • Posts: 6109
Reply #3 on: January 16, 2015, 12:53:58 PM
I never read Altered Carbon, so I can't comment on it. Just thought I'd chime in to say that Chasm City is probably best SF Mystery/Noir story I've ever read - it's utterly compelling and brilliant. It's part of a larger universe of novels by Reynolds, but it can be read as a stand-alone and works perfectly well as such.



DKT

  • Friendly Neighborhood
  • Hipparch
  • ******
  • Posts: 4980
  • PodCastle is my Co-Pilot
    • Psalms & Hymns & Spiritual Noir
Reply #4 on: January 16, 2015, 03:49:50 PM
Hey Eytan - oddly, it's the only book by Reynolds I've read (I don't know why, since I loved it probably close to as much as you did). Have you read more of his stuff? Anything in particular you'd recommend, in that universe or another?


eytanz

  • Moderator
  • *****
  • Posts: 6109
Reply #5 on: January 16, 2015, 05:05:49 PM
Hey Eytan - oddly, it's the only book by Reynolds I've read (I don't know why, since I loved it probably close to as much as you did). Have you read more of his stuff? Anything in particular you'd recommend, in that universe or another?

I've read Revelation Space (the series that Chasm City was spun off), and I'd recommend the first novel in the series (Revelation Space), but I didn't like its sequels much: Redemption Ark, the sequel, is not bad, but it expands the universe in ways that felt to me less intereting than the original novel. The third book in the trilogy, Absolution Gap, is so bleak and cynical I just couldn't enjoy it. I never read "The Prefect", which is another spin-off set in the same universe.

I have also read his two novella collection "Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days" set in the Revelation Space universe. Turquoise Days is ok, but Diamond Dogs hit a real nerve with me. It starts out silly (and not intentionally so) but ends up somewhere really disturbing (in a good way).

The only other book by him I've read is "Terminal World", which is a stand-alone book. I found it to be too long - I think a good editor could have cut it down by a third - but it's very clever and has multiple layers of meaning. I fully admit that I didn't realize everything that was going on in it until I read up some analyses online, which made me really appreciate the book a lot more. I'm being deliberately vague because, like Chasm City, it's a book whose enjoyment could be seriously impaired by spoilers.

Edit: spelling
« Last Edit: January 16, 2015, 06:24:01 PM by eytanz »



SonofSpermcube

  • Guest
Reply #6 on: January 17, 2015, 11:22:55 PM
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude. I read this when it first came out, I think? Maybe about 12 years ago? I had similar mixed feelings, but generally was glad to have read it. Parts of it I really liked (Morgan's voice is really good and set for SF noir), the protagonist, the tech. Parts of it not so much. All the women want Takeshi, even the ones who hate him - that was a particular frustration. And the mystery (again, it's been years) of who killed Bancroft seemed obvious to me from the get-go, even if the motivation wasn't.

It's been a while for me, too, but sex in SF usually grating on me, I recall being mostly okay with Altered Carbon in that regard.  Kovacs is a member of a mythologized elite, regardless of what body he's in.  The woman I think he was talking about was a genetically engineered immortal hedonist.  That she'd want him as a conquest made sense in particular, and that women would want him generally didn't seem too farfetched. 

But yeah, the big bad antagonist and the whole final confrontation were pretty awful.