Altered Carbon (Netflix)

[ctg]

Do you think that his almost 'practical' immortality actually changed his personality over time?

Most definitely. If immortality isn't a curse, it will go into your head and twist you. Being mortal makes you humble, but in Bancroft case, being able to buy one sleeve after another could not have been a good case. The life in that case loses a lot of its meaning. If sleeving was possible, I'd imagine that some people would have storages for changing bodies in the same rate they change clothes. The idiom: "You have to wear your best face for the occasion," would have completely different meaning than the norm we know.

 

[Connavar]

Most definitely. If immortality isn't a curse, it will go into your head and twist you. Being mortal makes you humble, but in Bancroft case, being able to buy one sleeve after another could not have been a good case. The life in that case loses a lot of its meaning. If sleeving was possible, I'd imagine that some people would have storages for changing bodies in the same rate they change clothes. The idiom: "You have to wear your best face for the occasion," would have completely different meaning than the norm we know.

That was one of the things that fascinated me most in the books, what has having so many sleeves, the power to live centuries done to the uber rich, the way they saw human life, it wasnt seen as forever young, party lifestyle.

It is realistic future, world in that only the rich can have bodies to wake up in when someone kills your sleeve. The only other people that was deemed worth to live again in other bodies by those in power was specialist like Kovacs, special ops soldier, sort of violent PI was always needed even if he was a criminal put in a shelf. You can clearly see that Kovacs current mind,self has been changed, altered and not for the better by living centuries, traveling and waking up in other bodies because of his job. The young soldier Kovacs in the flashbacks is very different from the old soul in Altered Carbon.

It also shows how worthless the human bodies is compared the great machine that is our brain, everything we are soul,so on is the thoughts in our brain. If i became an old white woman body doesnt matter if my brain is the same. No wonder Kovacs didnt react to waking up in older, less fit body that smoked.

 

[ctg]

As it has become tradition with the new Netflix show I watched first three before I was ready to write anything. The first thing I noticed was the minor changes and then major ones started appearing. If you haven't read the books and you don't have OCD, don't worry about the fact you'll learn more about Kovacs time in the Envoy Core than readers ever got to learn in first time. Richard K Morgan saved all that stuff to book 2. Most of what we got in the Book 1 was a couple scene with Quellchrist Falconer, explaining the important bits so that you could get on with the story.

I guess they needed to show the whole thing because otherwise Kovacs almost supernatural talents are unexplained. The minor changes are with the world and how the certain scene were written, like the introduction to Bancrofts palace. I, for one, cannot erase the tennis scene that Mister Morgan used to introduce Miriam, Laurens and some other minor family members. The thing that you miss in that is the fact that Miriam, unlike Laurens actually does something with her sleeve to keep it in excellent shape. She's not wearing it just for the show.

Well, maybe to lure some fleeting minds to admire her but when you're in that sort of position, you would most likely want people worshipping you "for being perfect." It also makes clear that Laurens doesn't have the same mindset. He doesn't really care for being so rich that he can own his own facilities where his backup sleeves are stored. So, in that sense the murder of Laurens Bancroft doesn't make much sense.

Only later on when you start to realise how bad boy he has been do you get a sense that someone might have tried to get away with him, but even then cocking up the backup facility is something the murderer missed. Which leaves the murder two possibilities, one, the murderer didn't failed to study the most important details or two, Laurens tried to kill himself but someone failed to stop the process of resleeving.

But, what that is the salt in this story, as Kovacs doesn't track down the perp straight away. Instead, like he says, "I'm going to discover some ugly truths, some you might not want to be discovered. It's a nasty business but, I'm going to do it any ways." And that leads to the business of learning on how the Altered Carbon world works. The thing Richard never explained was the Needle Cast.

Even though the TV shows depicts this process being Faster-Than-Light, it isn't. Instead the whole thing goes around the signal strength as the needle cast is a very powerful broadcast that is pinpointed in the vast canvas of space. In other words its a very direct, very narrow and very powerful signal that is used to carry the information between the star systems without losing its contents. Most often this transmission is used to carry the stack information so that the people can get download into new sleeves at their destinations. During that process you would lose years while the transmission travels from A to B and in theory, you could lose your life if something happened to the destination world in the meantime. Therefore, a lot of that time Kovacs spent in ice, could be down to the fact that his data was travelling from Harker's world to Earth.

Although you might read this as a complaining, it isn't because I love this show almost as much as I love the actual books. I never thought this series would happen so soon, because certain people has hammered into me that the Cyberpunks is dead. Is it?

 

[Nick B]

I didn't like the massive, unnecessary info dump about resleeving at the medical centre at the beginning, but other than that, no complaints. There are differences to the book of course.

 

[Dave]

I've only watched the first episode (I didn't realise the whole thing would be released at once and don't have time right now, though I'm not complaining.) I therefore, didn't notice too much different (though I do remember the tennis scene now.) I thought it was very faithful, and very good.

One thing I did wonder was how they are going to space the book out to a whole season of TV, and surely, even adding parts from the second book would still run out of story? I'll just have to wait and see.

Also James Purefoy was on BBC Radio 2 Steve Wright show yesterday talking about the series and his other work. Inevitably, Steve Wright compared it to Bladerunner. I wonder if people who have not read the books will always do that? Apart from the flying cars, urban sprawl and neon advertising (which isn't really a prerogative of Bladerunner) I don't see much similarity - except that they both have at their heart a detective story, and as discussed on this forum before there are very few examples of good detective stories in science fiction (and quite often when there are there is generally some deus ex machina solution to the murder that is rather unsatisfying.)

 

[ctg]

One thing I did wonder was how they are going to space the book out to a whole season of TV, and surely, even adding parts from the second book would still run out of story? I'll just have to wait and see.

There are much more about the book 2 than I'd have liked to see, and it makes me think they aren't going to do another season, when they have packed so much off that stuff in this one. If they'll do second season, maybe they'll put in stuff that they left out.

Also James Purefoy was on BBC Radio 2 Steve Wright show yesterday talking about the series and his other work. Inevitably, Steve Wright compared it to Bladerunner. I wonder if people who have not read the books will always do that?

When they cannot use another pop culture reference to describe the scenes they'll use the Bladerunner. The neonlights, hookers, and blood on the street can be found from other products, but as it was the first look they're always going back to it. I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd used Gibson Neuromancer as another reference, but for the mainstreet audience knowing that classic is much harder example.

Thing is we are living in the world that is increasingly cyberpunkish with these huge corporations, private militaries and technologies that enable paralysed man walk. In Altered Carbon these things are all true, and it goes further as Mister Morgan wrote about taking it all a bit further. I would classify AC as cyberpunk in ultratech world. Very similar in timeline to Reynolds Chasm City.

Maybe Netflix will make it next?

 

[ctg]

I finished it and I understand why they showed bits from the next book in this one. Netflix series is based upon story and the producers, hopefully with Morgan's blessing decided to not be truly faithful to the trilogy. So, some faiths has been altered and some of the coolest scenes isn't in it, but, it's not all bad.

Altered Carbon is an excellent series as it mostly stays mostly faithful to the originating story. You get the core from the book and you'll get to know Kovacs is more than a human; as in the cyberpunk terms he's altered human. But, what might not come across that easily is that Morgan's world is an utopia instead of dystopia that one so often finds in the core of this story.

Although this story is really dark, there's so much light in it that everything you'll see is actually positive. In the terms of mortality the stack technology offers immortality for those who can afford. But, it doesn't end there as the offworld locations are available. Some in contractual terms in the service of UN forces. So, in a way Morgan's world is very similar to one seen in the Expanse, as in the core of both series are united forces that are doing the world policing wherever humans have spread.

I hope people see success in this one as so far the cyberpunk has been a hard bargain for the mainstream audience. Some see the shades of dystopia so rebelling that they'll might stop watching this altogether. Nevertheless, I raise my hat and applaud for work well done.

I loved it and I'd like to see more.

 

[ctg]

Similarly, while the world’s population is growing, it’d have to swell an awful lot before people started living on the Golden Gate Bridge in stacks of cargo containers, as they do both in Altered Carbon and Gibson’s Bridge trilogy. If America has one thing, it’s a lot of space. Watch out for a similar arrangement in the upcoming Spielberg adaptation of Ready Player One, in which the protagonist lives in a stack of motorhomes outside Oklahoma. In the novel, no good reason is given for why the motorhomes are stacked like this.

What Netflix's Altered Carbon's cyberpunk world gets wrong about the future | WIRED UK

This thing, in the book Morgan described that outside the city most of the country had returned back to wilderness. Kovacs rents an old school petrol engine car and drives off the city to seek Vernon's family. When he finds them, they're living in an abandoned aircraft carrier and the description sets its scenery to be very back-to-the-roots like.

The Bay City is very urban, even sprawl like opposite to modern day San Francisco. So, I can only assume they thought that making the Golden Gate Bridge look as if it had been populated by poor people somewhat fought against Morgan's vision. The Earth simply isn't as overcrowded as it is depicted in the Netflix series. But in the terms of cyberpunk vision it worked.

 

[The Bluestocking]

I finished it and I understand why they showed bits from the next book in this one. Netflix series is based upon story and the producers, hopefully with Morgan's blessing decided to not be truly faithful to the trilogy. So, some faiths has been altered and some of the coolest scenes isn't in it, but, it's not all bad.

Altered Carbon is an excellent series as it mostly stays mostly faithful to the originating story. You get the core from the book and you'll get to know Kovacs is more than a human; as in the cyberpunk terms he's altered human. But, what might not come across that easily is that Morgan's world is an utopia instead of dystopia that one so often finds in the core of this story.

Although this story is really dark, there's so much light in it that everything you'll see is actually positive. In the terms of mortality the stack technology offers immortality for those who can afford. But, it doesn't end there as the offworld locations are available. Some in contractual terms in the service of UN forces. So, in a way Morgan's world is very similar to one seen in the Expanse, as in the core of both series are united forces that are doing the world policing wherever humans have spread.

I hope people see success in this one as so far the cyberpunk has been a hard bargain for the mainstream audience. Some see the shades of dystopia so rebelling that they'll might stop watching this altogether. Nevertheless, I raise my hat and applaud for work well done.

I loved it and I'd like to see more.

Amen to this.

This adaptation did another thing right as well - their treatment of female characters and commentary on violence against women. This isn't common at all in mainstream pop culture entertainment. (*Cough*Game of Thrones *CoughCough*). BLADE RUNNER 2049 is also Cyberpunk and was misogynist as hell. ALTERED CARBON is accused of being a "low rent rip-off of BLADE RUNNER" which, gimme a break - it isn't. It's part of the same genre but does a lot of things better... including and especially the portrayal of women and violence against women. I've read critics screaming about the prostitution/sex work component of the story but not one critic actually bothered to give credit where credit is due - that we get to see systemic violence against women roundly condemned in the story.

Even a very geeky friend of mine who has been complaining that the series diverged a lot from the books acknowledged this. And that the adaptation can stand on its own merits and is entertaining and thought-provoking in its own way.

And again - certainly far better than BLADE RUNNER 2049 which had him (a PKD fan) foaming at the mouth.

 

[ctg]

I've read critics screaming about the prostitution/sex work component of the story but not one critic actually bothered to give credit where credit is due

If you remove two elements from this story it falls flat on it face. One of them is the violence on weaker sex but it's not celebrated. Instead its shown that the act is condemned strongly. In the next book, this element changes a bit as that sort of event doesn't play a big role. Mostly likely we are going to see oppression against masses done differently. Why nobody has pointed out that the AI's suffer in this series a lot?

 

[Dave]

I'm still only up to episode 4 but I'd say that there was extreme violence against everyone, regardless of sex. We saw it against women, because Bancroft is heterosexual with a liking for beating up on women, and so in investigating the case it was necessary to speak to those women. However, the zero-G cage fighting and the VR torture rooms did not discriminate. I remember both from reading the book, but in full-screen, technicolor, that violence was much more graphic.

Why nobody has pointed out that the AI's suffer in this series a lot?

I agree. The discrimination against AIs is rife. The poor may be third-class citizens, but the AIs are just machines without feelings, when clearly they do have feelings. Abuse does not have to be violent physical abuse to be worrying.

 

[The Bluestocking]

If you remove two elements from this story it falls flat on it face. One of them is the violence on weaker sex but it's not celebrated. Instead its shown that the act is condemned strongly. In the next book, this element changes a bit as that sort of event doesn't play a big role. Mostly likely we are going to see oppression against masses done differently. Why nobody has pointed out that the AI's suffer in this series a lot?

This scene in particular shows how appropriately the show treats violence against women:

Spoiler

When Tak's group mounts their infiltration of the snuff prostitution den Head In The Clouds, they didn't realise what it was. But when Vernon Elliot (posing as a john, with a camera on him showing what's happening around him) is confronted with the reality, he not only treated the sex worker with kindness, everyone back at The Raven (including Poe the AI) were genuinely horrified, then doubly determined to take down Rei's corrupt and cruel operations. Now that was extremely well-done as a way to show how evil systems perpetrating violence against women is - it's not shown gratuitously for kicks. It's shown to be the depravity that it is that it is. And it didn't seem preachy because we see the characters' reactions as a group instead of them verbally expressing their horror.

Not many shows do this and/or can pull it off.

Also: I applaud the showrunners and script writers for showing us a racially diverse future and being able to avoid whitewashing.

 

[ctg]

I applaud the showrunners and script writers for showing us a racially diverse future and being able to avoid whitewashing.

They do this same thing in Bright, where Orcs are seen the lowest form of life quality. The whole thing with Head-in-the-Clouds comes out sooner in the actual book as a result to investigate Bancroft's amnesia. I believe Morgan wrote it in as the ultimate conclusion to the story into the power abuse. Earth is consider to be the last place where people want to go in the Kovac's universe. Harlan's World is considered to be the hub for all sorts of activity, while Earth is considered to be the trash bin, a place littered with historical ruins.

The biggest disappoint for me was that they didn't show Miriam's Map Room and explain her connection with the Songspire. They also did poor job on showing that Miriam is the wealthy one and Bancroft is the money making machine. But, what they did very well was showing strong females in all fronts. None of them looked especially week, even though Ava was supposed to be the weakest one.

 

[WarriorMouse]

Have never read the book/books? and having now binge watched the Netflix adaptation I likely won't, nor will I likely watch a second series. Dystopian future of that type just isn't my thing.
That said, anyone else see the Zamboni in the series street scene's ?

 

[ctg]

Dystopian future of that type just isn't my thing.

I bet you don't like the Expanse as well, do you? The future in it is really dark. They don't have the luxury of other worlds. Earth is overpopulated and from what we've seen a not very nice to live if you're a normal citizen. The class warfare you see in this one is even more extreme.

In the book 1, which deals with Earth, most of the countryside has turned back or under AI controlled farms and so on. In the book 2 you learn that humanity has advanced really far away from what you see on Earth, while the final one you get to learn about the aliens they call in this series as Eternals and how far humanity has advanced in the space-technology. The only dystopian thing in this series besides the Meths is the class warfare and the dividence between the rich and the poor. Rest is as you see today.

 

[Connavar]

If you remove two elements from this story it falls flat on it face. One of them is the violence on weaker sex but it's not celebrated. Instead its shown that the act is condemned strongly. In the next book, this element changes a bit as that sort of event doesn't play a big role. Mostly likely we are going to see oppression against masses done differently. Why nobody has pointed out that the AI's suffer in this series a lot?

The few negative reviews i have seen are from people who dont know the book,the kind of story it was or even bother to look up what norish cyberpunk with dystopian future is suppose look like. Its just mainstream blog bs to complain about violence on women because that happens too often our world why wouldnt it be part of the story in future SF story where the people have even less power in places like Bay City,Earth. Also dont watch a story based on Richard Morgans novel if you are complain about violence, nudity. The original story is about a trained killer, who is altered to kill for others.

It is better with critics who talk about Takeshi Kovacs himself, the world is impressively well copied from the book but it can be too much info dump, its not as seemlessly well build over 2-3 books like Morgan who told us more about Falconer, Harlan's World, Kovacs time as enjoy in the second book and not in Altered Carbon.

I agree pretty much with your assessment, this is well made, successful Cyberpunk adaptation, that might popularize the subgenre in TVs golden age. As big Kovacs fan, fan of Morgan uber cool cyberpunk worlds, great blend of action, exploration of identity,bodies i was happy to see it didnt disappoint me as fan of the book series.

 

[Dave]

When I saw Dichen Lachman, from Dollhouse, in the training camp scene, I thought she was too big an actress to be only in that one scene. So, I'm not surprised she has just appeared in the episode I just watched. I hadn't realised she was Kovac's sister though, and I don't remember that happening in the book, so we are starting to diverge a little now?

The whole thing with Head-in-the-Clouds comes out sooner in the actual book as a result to investigate Bancroft's amnesia. I believe Morgan wrote it in as the ultimate conclusion to the story into the power abuse. Earth is consider to be the last place where people want to go in the Kovac's universe. Harlan's World is considered to be the hub for all sorts of activity, while Earth is considered to be the trash bin, a place littered with historical ruins.

My memory of the ending is poor, but we seem to have already covered most of the book, just half way through the episodes.

 

[ctg]

I hadn't realised she was Kovac's sister though, and I don't remember that happening in the book, so we are starting to diverge a little now?

Yes. It's the big difference.

 

[Connavar]

I like the changes that is very different, new because it's still the same story of Kovacs remembering his old self,history with QF, envoys while working the case. Doesn't matter they mix book 1& book 2. A page by page copy of the books are a waste for us book fans. I wanted to see as a new SF story with TK, his world.

I hope there is season 2 because then there will be a new actor with new sleeve to fit the story. Hope it's book 3, focus on asian actor being the cool Japanese-slavic SF hero. Like the flashbacks in S1 I want to see the body Takeshi prefer. That's a rare chance. I think book 2 is weaker no matter the body he is in

 

[ctg]

There are three things I would have loved to see in this one, first Bancrofts personal armourer. There isn't a similar character in the following books. Second, the whole arena fight. Third, Kadmin's interrogation in Hendrix VR suite.