Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Disclaimer: I DNFed (did not finish) Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan at 36%, but I want to talk about it!
Altered Carbon is a cyberpunk novel set in a universe where humans have colonized huge swatches of it. This universe is so far in the future from our own that the Mars colony is considered ancient. Human consciousness can be downloaded to various bodies to travel across large swatches of space, eliminating the need for the time it takes to travel and preserving the original bodies during this travel.
I appreciated this idea. This book asks, What does that look like when the human body isn't considered you? The answer is rentable bodies and extreme violence.
This leads to our main character, Takeshi Kovacs, getting contracted by a billionaire to discover who murdered his last body.
The story definitely pokes fun at the idea of money and class and how, without the fear of pure death, since you can download your consciousness to be reuploaded, et infinitum, the meaning of life becomes ephemeral.
Where this story fell apart for me is the handling of women's bodies.
Mild spoilers ahead! Trigger warning: Torture.
Every time a woman's character is depicted, we know the state of her "elusive globes."
Now, I totally understand that Takeshi Kovacs is a male, so I didn't mind this for a while.
At one point, we learn that one of the characters has a body that emits a drug all the time through her sweat, fluids, etc, that makes her and others around her aroused. This was an intriguing idea because, again, this spoke to the consumerism concept that living for 100s of years might generate and a disregard for the sanctity of human bodies that is pervasive in this universe.
I explain all this to say that I know the difference between when the cyberpunk genre tries to be edgy versus when the author steps too far.
The scene that made me ultimately DNF this book was when Kovacs gets tortured, and they purposefully switch him into a female body (again, the character comments on the state of the woman's upper body). The author explains that the reason they chose to torture him as a woman is because women feel more pain during their periods, and then the book proceeds to brutally mutilate the woman's body.
What literary purpose did that serve? If the goal was to make him suffer, they could've just burned his male body parts, too—why the gender swap?
Does this add to the story, or is it shock value?
Let me know what you think!
