Altered Carbon is a cyberpunk novel by Richard Morgan, 526 pages, published in 2002. It is far from the classics of the genre, and the day I read it it became one of my favourite cyberpunk books.
On 1 February 2018 Netflix released a series with the same name, with a marketing campaign you could not miss. The promotion matched the money spent on production, and the result is spectacular.
The idea was a goldmine: consciousness, personality and memories transplanted into a chip implanted at birth in the whole population. You can die and come back. You can change bodies the way you change a coat. The narrative possibilities are enormous, and that is exactly what the series shows.
From now on, when someone thinks of a cyberpunk setting they will not think of Blade Runner. Not even of Blade Runner 2049. They will think of Altered Carbon. It has every ingredient of the genre, in the right proportion: artificial intelligences, cybernetic implants, consciousness transfer, immortality through technology, mega-corporations, flying cities, low life, new religions, drugs and virtual reality. It fulfils the low life, high tech motto at 101%.
One complaint, and it is a real one: the script softens the book. Kovacs was an antihero who was hard to digest, a bastard you respected without liking him. On screen he becomes an acceptable bad boy, full of common places. The photography and the production are impressive; the character is smaller than the one I read.
Even so: if someone asks me what cyberpunk is, I tell them to watch the first episode of Altered Carbon. That, exactly, is cyberpunk.
Keep reading: Black Mirror, Maniac and the best cyberpunk books.
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