Wither Cyberpunk?

Hello and welcome back. Today, we’re taking a break from milquetoast white middle class takes on socio-political issues and getting back to what I’m really good at: Nonsensical waffling about deeply nerdy shit. That’s right, today we’re going to talk about cyberpunk.

Here’s what I said about the genre back in March:

Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.

It is. It’s a narrative straight-jacket capable of telling about three possible stories, all of them involving a hacker, a gun-toting mercenary and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Spoilers: They all die and live happily ever after.

That said, it’s surprising how long and how well the genre has survived since it downloaded itself into the public infosphere back in the early 80s. In the 90s it was rebooted through Neal Stephenson’s books and the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun RPG as well as William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (peak Gibson, to my mind), then saved from the Y2K bug by things like the “Blade Runner” sequel or Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” series (covered here, here and here), which later became a Netflix series (here and here). Everything from “Black Mirror” to “Love, Death and Robots” owes a deep debt to this genre.

And it keeps going. Pandemic willing, we are currently four months away from the November 19 release of CD Projekt Red’s latest game, “Cyberpunk 2077” (which I wrote a little about here) and its promise of infinitely customizable genitalia. A tie-in anime has also been announced, slated for release in 2021. Cyberpunk has never been hotter, or cooler, or whatever your desired ambient temperature may be.

The question is, Why?

Why does this genre, so evidently a product of a very specific place and time (my bedroom, circa 1990) continue to enjoy such popularity?

Part of the reason cyberpunk is enjoying a revival, as British author Adam Roberts suggests in his blog Morphosis, is probably because kids like me who grew up in the 80s are now in positions to make creative decisions about what gets made, and we’re all feeling a little nostalgic for some babes, bikes and Blade Runner.

Another part of the reason may be pure fashion. Black never goes out of style. William Gibson’s seminal novel “Neuromancer” published in 1984 gets a lot of the credit for kicking off the genre, but it’s worth pointing out this was actually two years after both Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga series “Akira” (movie-fied in 1988) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”, which together established a set of aesthetics that have survived the intervening 30 years as a shorthand for effortless dystopic cool.

It’s the aesthetics that have stuck with us more than anything, but I’m not sure those alone explain the longevity of such an (apparently) niche genre. To be sure, the fact that cyberpunk gives artists a fig leaf to cover the fetishization of gratuitously bloody gunplay and large-breasted girls is attractive to some. That doesn’t explain, for example, Altered Carbon’s use of the genre to explore themes of resistance to power and control though, or Blade Runner: 2049’s more mournful contemplation of the definition of self.

There is, I think, an ideological core to cyberpunk which still resonates with us, even 30 years later. The concerns the genre raises have not gone away, and indeed, have become ever more pressing.

What is the cyberpunk manifesto? Let’s have a look.

Tenet 1: Technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and invasive

The first and most important assertion cyberpunk makes about our future (looking forward from the 80s) is that we will become dependent on technology in every aspect of our lives.

Information networks will become connected and regulate everything from finance to consumption to politics.

In parallel, technology will also invade the body, leading to physical enhancement or even the total separation of mental and physical selves, but also a growing alienation and loss of control over ourselves. As your mind and body become increasingly digitized, you will suffer the same vulnerabilities as all digital devices—subject to manipulation and hacking.

Tenet 2: Privatization of everything and societal collapse

Cyberpunk’s corollary to the increasing colonization of every aspect of society by technology is that such technology will make it easier and easier for wealth and power to be accumulated in private hands, while public institutions grow weaker and weaker until they are effectively useless.

The lawless vacuum their collapse creates will be filled with private armies, mercenaries and assassins, drug dealers, sex workers, gangs, especially the yakuza, cyborgs and killer robots.

Tenet 3: It’s up to the lone-wolf antisocial rebel hero to save the day

The governments, the police, the corporations, and pretty much every institution you can name is either powerless or corrupt or more likely some neon-blended combination of the two. As a result, it’s up to individuals to fight back against oppression, exploitation and evil.

Okay, so that didn’t happen

At first glance, it seems easy to dismiss many of the predictions cyberpunk tried to make about the future of society.

Cyberspace, for example, has not become an immersive VR experience, but instead a Matryoshka collection of nesting screens growing paradoxically both smaller and more intrusive.

Governments have not collapsed, as electorates and oligarchs have increasingly turned to “strong men” clamping down harder and harder the more they sense the world is slipping from their grasp.

Japanese corporations, far from continuing to buy up larger and larger swathes of North America, have gone into retreat. Indeed, the 90s yellow-peril specter of Japanese domination (see Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” and Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, ’92 and ’94 respectively) now seems positively quaint.

Yet if you stop for a moment and look past the surface aesthetics and focus instead on what cyberpunk is actually saying, it’s clear many of these issues are very much still with us today.

Has technology invaded our lives? Are we dependent on it?

Ooh you betcha. Uploaded consciousness or total body prosthesis is still the realm of SF, but come on.

We all carry little rectangles of plastic and wiring that connect us 24/7 to a global information network of reaction gifs, porn, unhinged political tweets and inanely niche blogs. Social media is in the process of monetizing every aspect of our private lives. Facial recognition software and surveillance technology mean we are never truly alone. Your phone might be listening to everything you say. Your car is evaluating how well you drive, and telling your insurer. Your TV is talking to your fridge, and they think you’re a loser.

Technology has never been more omni-present in our lives, and despite appearances, I don’t think we’re any more comfortable with it than we were 30 years ago. We’ve just adopted a kind of learned helplessness, accepted that there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.

Have social institutions weakened? Are corporations becoming laws unto themselves?

I mean, come on. High-tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft are effectively ungovernable. Septuagenarian senators haven’t the faintest clue what these companies even do, much less how they might be regulated. Meanwhile health costs skyrocket, education fails to deliver either basic life skills or post-graduate employment, families are divided across Facebook battlezones, and ununionized workforces trapped in the gig economy Uber-drive in their spare time just to get by.

While corporations themselves have not accumulated power into the hands of faceless boards, that role has instead been played by the charismatic hero-CEO, the Jeff Bezos, Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, the infamous 0.1% against whom even the wealth of the 1% pales into insignificance. Cyberpunk is worried about the way technology creates an inequality of information that in turn accelerates the inequality of wealth, and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of late-stage capitalism.

Lawlessness has absolutely been the result, as people slowly realize the way in which traditional power structures have been co-opted to operate to service the elite. Our cousins in the good ole US of Americuh are one month into nation-wide protests against the perceived failings of their police and judicial system. Just before that, gun-armed protesters were storming state capitals to demand a lifting of restrictions on economic activity. There is an increasing sense that systems don’t work, and it’s up to people to take matters into their own hands.

And I think that’s why we still have cyberpunk. The core unease, the sense that Joe, Jane and Gennefer average has lost control of the technology we use, and by extension of the societies we live in, has not gone away. It’s here, and it’s stronger than ever. And so is cyberpunk.

Altered Carbon: Resleeved

Title: Altered Carbon—Resleeved

Directed by: Takeru Nakajima & Yoshiyuki Okuda

Screenplay: Dai Sato & Tsukasa Kondo

Network: Netflix

 

Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.

 

Show me a cyberpunk cityscape and I won’t be able to tell you if it’s from Altered Carbon, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell or Johnny Mnemonic. Every megacorp in every neon-lit sprawl is owned by a megarich oligarch using technology to oppress, rather than free the average chummer. Every anonymous hacker is fighting against this oppression (rather than doxxing feminists on Facebook or posting neo-Nazi diatribes on Reddit). We get it, cyberpunk: Money, technology and corporations bad, ex-military cyborg mercenaries good!

 

The Japanese have become one of the standard-bearers of the genre, probably because their vending-machine mediated society is already more than halfway there. Akira and Ghost in the Shell in all their branching, self-replicating swarms of comic books, feature films and serialized formats form one of the kernels of Cyberpunk’s programming.

 

Like most works in this narrow (and honestly, creatively spent) genre, the Altered Carbon series by Richard K. Morgan owed more than a little debt to the Japanese, as witnessed by the name of the main character, Takeshi Kovacs.

 

In the spirit of self-recursion then, hot on the heels of season 2 in Netflix’s Altered Carbon adaptation, the property pays homage to its roots with “Resleeved,” an original one-off feature-length prequel to season 1, done in CGIed anime style. (Note: To clarify, it’s a prequel to the series, not the books, as it features elements absent from the books, such as Takeshi’s sister and the idea that Envoys were freedom fighters rather than government stormtroops).

 

In “Resleeved,” Kovacs is hired by the yakuza to protect a tattoo artist who has been targeted by assassins, just as the yakuza syndicate prepares for a ceremony to transfer leadership from one generation to the next. He’s joined by a pink-haired government agent, and a holographic hotel AI (in a blatant and unnecessary copy of a story element from the Altered Carbon series).

 

The story, by screenwriters who’ve worked on Ghost in the Shell’s serialized sibling, the Stand Alone Complex, as well as other oddities like Halo Legends, is … not smart. While the basic concept is sound, the execution is pure edgy teenager trying to impress. The whole movie is essentially five or six fight scenes loosely strung together, with the knots tying each string striving to outdo one another in stupidity: Kovacs is downloaded into a naked body in the middle of an S&M dance club. A yakuza guard gets murdered and his security key stolen—and two days later his key still works just fine. Nobody bothered tracing or cancelling it. A horde of dozens of assassins just wander into a yakuza stronghold, and nobody asks how they gained entry.

 

There’s nothing new here, either conceptually or visually.

 

While exactly how the big bad executes his nefarious plan is different in its colorful details, involving a tattoo and Altered Carbon's concept of digitized consciousness and the ability to switch bodies, we’ve done yakuza to death, the city is pure Blade Runner: 2049 and they’ve even reused the hotel AI idea from the Netflix show.

 

Visually, the action is pure manga, with blood splattering across walls, floors, ceilings and the “camera” lens as samurai swords gleefully bisect bodies at every angle like something straight out of Ninja Scrolls. There’s an energy and exuberance to the shot composition, I’ll grant you, reminiscent of “The Witness” segment from “Love, Death and Robots” but for the most part it’s nothing we haven’t been seeing in the genre for the last 20 years, just CGed up a bit.

 

I don’t expect every pop culture product to deliver a grand statement on the Way Life Is and the Nature of the Human Condition, but I just found this a little too derivative, a little too gore-passing-for-cool, a little too I’ve-seen-this-before.

 

One last thing: Oddly, the English voice acting and the English subtitles appear to have been created by people working from two different versions of the script—or the original Japanese script was translated by two different people, one for the voice actors, one for the subtitles. Anyway, the two frequently don’t match up, which can be a little disorienting if you’re listening with the subtitles on.

Altered Carbon (Season 2)

Title: Altered Carbon (Season 2)
Showrunners: Laeta Kalogridis, Alison Schapker
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, Sang Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Nevin Densham, Alison Schapker, Elizabeth Padden
Network: Netflix

While the very word “Adaptation” implies change, I wish more adapters would err on the side of changing too little rather than too much. This Carbon would have been better if they’d altered it a bit less.

The Altered Carbon series on Netflix is an adaptation of a three-book series about super-soldier turned lone gun for hire Takeshi Kovacs, by author Richard K. Morgan. Series 1, released in 2018, covered the first book in the series, which I wrote about here and here. If you’re lazy, and hey we’re on the Internet so yeah, the gee-whiz SF premise is that human consciousness can be digitized, stored in a “stack” implanted in the spine, and downloaded into any available “sleeve” (what people in far future land call bodies).

This second incarnation of the Altered Carbon series is a bit of a mashup—in the messiest sense of the word—of elements from books 2 and 3 of the Takeshi Kovacs series, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, altered to the point of almost unrecognizability.

Carrera and Kemp from Broken Angels show up, though their motivations and characters are completely altered. The setting has been moved to Harlan’s World, as in Woken Furies, and it follows book 3’s hunt for legendary rebel leader Quellcrist Falconer plot line, though of course they had to make this literal by turning it into a hunt for the actual person rather than a copy of her consciousness. As I said before, we are in the age of incredibly literal SF. Oshima from book 3 is transformed into a black lesbian woman named Trepp (Simone Missick), though amazingly without raising the kind of outcry that casting white actor Joel Kinnaman to play a white character with a half-Japanese half-Czech name did in season 1.

Can’t imagine why not.

If you’ve never read the books that’s going to make as much sense as alien hieroglyphs, so here’s the plot: Kovacs (played by Anthony Mackie this time) is convinced his long-vanished lover Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is still alive. He is lured back to his home world of Harlan’s World by the prospect of finding her, only to discover he is suspected of murdering a cabal of super-rich “Meths” (short for methuselah because of their money-fueled longevity). He enlists the aid of Trepp and Poe (Chris Conner), the holographic hotel AI from season 1, and is hunted by Colonel Carrera (Torben Liebrecht), who creates a clone of Kovacs based on a stored copy of Kovac’s consciousness (Will Yun Lee) to help track down the fugitives.  

None of these details actually matter much. Here’s what the show is like to watch: Bam! Aaah! Watch out! [Voiceover] Memories, are, like, ghosts, you know? Nanoswarm! The construct is destabilizing! Smash! Waaugh! Gyaaa! The End.

The first two episodes in particular are written by idiots for idiots.

Two examples from the first couple of episodes may illustrate:

Kovacs is stabbed in the shoulder and knocked unconscious. He awakes with no memory of what happened. To make himself remember, he stabs himself in the shoulder. Thank god his assailant didn’t kick him in the testicles.

In another scene, Colonel Carrera and four of his men (despite being a Colonel, Carrera only seems to have about four—alas for streaming TV budgets) investigate the scene of a murder. The police allow them in, but confiscate their weapons (why, I have no idea). Carrera and his men kill the cops anyway: Carrera takes one cop’s gun, shoots the cop, then tosses it to one of his men, who does a pirouette and then shoots another cop, the ballet guy then tosses the gun to yet another solider, who does a backflip, then shoots a third cop, backflippy tosses the gun YET AGAIN … Anyway, at the end of it all Carrera reports everything he found at the crime scene without covering anything up, so. What. The. Fuck. Was that all in aid of?

The dialog is enjoyable in its schlocky cheesiness. Colonel Carrera gets most of the best (worst) lines: “If we’re talking wolves, I’m the alpha and you’re nothing but my bitch.” Though frankly this is slightly let down by the fact that as the big bad, Carrera looks like a middle-aged metrosexual with about as much menace as Mark Ruffalo.

There are attempts at a serious tone, with laboring weighty voiceovers about the way we are are haunted by memories and vainly attempt to recreate our pasts, but the seriousness is undercut by the nonsensical action. The treatment of the virtual and digital is especially silly: Poe, the holographic AI, carries a shotgun, drinks whiskey and manipulates other programs by waving his hands around in midair.

To be honest, the show doesn’t seem that interested in its own themes, anyway. Character motivations are impossible to follow and don’t matter, as every problem is resolved by punching or shooting things. Carrera is working against the planet’s governor, no he’s working for her, Quellcrist is a murderer, no she’s a victim, no she’s a willing accomplice. Clone Kovacs is a ruthless killer who murders Trepp’s father, no he’s a caring, sensitive guy you’d like if you got to know him personally. Maybe if given enough time these changes would sit better, but with a season of just eight episodes character arcs get rushed in the mad dash to get through the convoluted plot involving about four double-crosses and a lot of unconvincing technobabble.

I get that streaming TV is not words on paper, and each medium imposes different needs. However, as I argued with Star Trek Discovery, if all you keep is the surface level stuff—the names and places, some of the technology, one or two lines—then why not go all the way and make something totally new? Using original works of fiction for little more than name recognition feels an uncomfortable combination of both horribly cynical and terribly hubristic—assuming you as the TV writer know better how to craft a story than the bestselling author whose works you’re plundering for your story line.

Think back to the Lord of the Rings movies, probably the best-loved and most widely acclaimed SF/Fantasy adaptations in recent memory (Game of Thrones had a shot at the title before that last season, sigh). Now, what do people remember about those movies? Was it Legolas surfing down an elephant’s trunk while no-scoping orcs with his bow? Was it Aragorn somehow grabbing a green ghost by the neck and threatening it with his sword? Was it the incredibly literal interpretation of the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a gigantic searchlight? Or—or were these dismissed as risible additions by the writers to an otherwise vivid portrayal of one of the classics of modern English literature?

The Takeshi Kovacs books are certainly no Lord of the Rings, but there was a core to them, a bitter suspicion of the corrosive effects that the convergence of money and technology into the hands of a few can have, but also a deep wariness of fanatics and extremists of any stripe—people who believe deeply in a cause often don’t care too much about the people who follow it. That gets thrown out the window—season 2 ends with Quellcrist vowing to travel to some other planet to continue her bloody revolution.

It’s a light, mildly diverting, disposable time-filler, something Netflix can dump on the service to keep you busy for a week or two until the next show comes around, but that’s pretty much the only mileage I got out of it.

Thin Air

Title: Thin Air
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Publisher: Del Rey

This is kind of Morgan returning to his roots, as Thin Air is more like Altered Carbon than anything he's published in the intervening years. 

There's a cynical, hard-bitten, quasi-military protagonist who now works independently, dragged into a missing person investigation that turns out to be part of a bigger conspiracy ... which is pretty close to the setup of Altered Carbon. The action takes place on a barely- slash badly-terraformed Mars rather than Earth and the gee-whiz technology is cybernetic implants rather than digitally backed-up consciousness, but the tone, setting and story beats are all pretty familiar.

I suspect whether you like this or not will depend on how you felt about Altered Carbon, and whether you wanted more of the same. Personally, I enjoyed the overall style and tone, but the hero is a little too super-powered for my taste, and like a lot of whodunits a lot rides on suspects or baddies revealing their entire plans in lengthy monologues in unlikely situations, and plus I think the conspiracy is a little too convoluted for its own good.

Maybe the biggest change, other than the surface details of the setting, is there's a kind of acceptance in the writing that wasn't there 16 years ago--the world is shit, but it's the world we gotta live in, so we might as well make the best of it. Despite the noir style there is an almost, if not quite hopeful, then almost zen feel to the ending.

So, if you liked A.C. this will definitely scratch almost exactly the same itch. If not, probably not your thing.

Woken Furies

Title: Woken Furies
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

Maybe there's something both sad and inevitable in the way the idealism of youth gives way to the practicality and compromise of middle age, and so on down that slippery moral slope to the conservatism of our golden years. When the hippy generation rose to power we got not peace and love but two Gulf wars and a housing bubble. 

Woken Furies, the third in Richard Morgan's cyberpunk series featuring taciturn badass anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs, is Kovacs in middle age, the burning fervor of Altered Carbon tempered through the fires of Broken Angels, now reduced to nostalgic bitterness and disillusionment.

It's a far more meandering book than the first two in the series, a blurry, unfocused plot in dire need of bifocals, as former government super-soldier Kovacs returns to his birthplace of Harlan's World on the path of revenge, then becomes a fugitive among robot-hunting mercenaries, then rounds up a group of ageing revolutionaries in order to stage a rescue, then has to do it all over again. Spoilers!

The writing in the sense of painting-pretty-pictures-with-words is still top class though, and Kovacs' return to the Japanese-influenced Harlan's World allows Morgan to slip in some dry jokes among the place names: Tekitomura ("Random town"), Tadaimako ("Welcome back") Harbour, Muko ("Over there") Prospect.

It's the tone and theme, however, that have come the furthest since Altered Carbon.

While Kovacs remains his monosyllabic, irresistible-to-women self (tangent: did Morgan have it in his contract that Kovacs would have full-on triple-X sex with two separate women in each novel? Because it works out exactly--two technicolor sex scenes with two individuals. Every. Damn. Book.) but instead of the eat-the-rich anger of Altered Carbon, he's now cynical about political causes, noting that revolutionaries care as little about the individual as the repressive governments they plan to overthrow.

During his time among the mercenaries, Kovacs meets Oshima, a woman who may have downloaded into her own brain a copy of the consciousness of Quellcrist Falconer, a near-legendary rebel leader and kind of moral lodestone for Kovacs throughout the series. Only now, faced with the possibility of meeting his idol, Kovacs is disinterested, wanting only to restore Oshima's personality and individuality. The other ex-revolutionaries, on the other hand, have very different priorities.

It's not just politics that's grown up, though. Kovacs' return to his homeworld brings him into contact with many of his old associates from his youth, and from his time as an "Envoy" (a sort of intergalactic space commando), and he learns the hard way that the way he remembers things are not the way others do, that our happy peaks are sometimes our friends' lowest troughs, that our friends grow apart from us and we discover there really wasn't that much keeping us together in the first place, save for the convenience of proximity and time.

He even--bigger spoilers--comes face to face with a younger version of himself, and hates what he sees.

To the extent that living on this funny old world of ours has imparted me with any wisdom whatsoever, these realizations ring true, though I'm not sure what anyone could do with this knowledge--if you're young, you probably don't believe it, and if you're not (like me) well, then it's already too late, innit?

Those themes can be a little hard to see as you're wading through yet another rat-at-at action sequence or a squishy sex scene, but once you put the book down for a bit and let it sit, these things come into focus and leave you with an appropriately somber, reflective mood for the end of the trilogy.
  

A Break from Cyberpunk: Broken Angels

Title: Broken Angels
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

In this semi-sequel to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's body hopping anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs returns, this time to take two-fisted aim at corporate greed and the commercialization of war.  

Sixty years after the events of Carbon (which is referenced briefly once then promptly forgotten), Kovacs is now a mercenary fighting on the revolution-wracked world of Sanction IV, where rebels are liberally dispensing nukes to anyone they don't like, while the corporate-backed cartel government is using even worse weapons.

In the midst of all this, Kovacs is approached by a deserter from the rebel side with a proposition: help uncover a 'Martian' artifact found on the planet, and help everyone involved become filthy rich. (Martians being the colloquial name for a race of presumably-extinct highly advanced aliens whose ruins mankind has discovered).

To that end, Kovacs assembles a team consisting of such Dirty Dozen tropes as the Demolitions Expert, the Ninja Assassin, the Hotshot Pilot and you get the idea. They all go traipsing off to a highly irradiated beach that will inevitably kill them all as they dig for said artifact.

Oh that's right, this is the universe where people's consciousness is digitally backed up in a 'cortical stack' implanted inside their spines, allowing them to be ported from one body to another or even squirted across space to another star. 

Now, being backed up strikes me as being pretty cold comfort if you're dead (Morgan establishes in graphic detail that getting shot in the head still kills you--the stack is a backup, not the real you). I could see it being a kind of life insurance deal (at least my family will be provided for, etc.) in the event of accidental death, but in Broken Angels a whole platoon of guys go into a hot zone knowing they are 100% positively absotively going to die, and comfort themselves with the knowledge that their digital selves will enjoy a reward afterwards. That seems a trifle ... psychotic. No?

Removed from Altered Carbon's urban setting this feels much more military scifi than cyberpunk, though to be honest the secret elite crack super-soldier crack elite super squad do very little but die of radiation exposure and have graphic sex with Kovacs.

And can I point out how creepy it is to have vivid sex scenes in a book that's written in first person? Who exactly are we supposed to imagine Kovacs is telling all these slippery, gushy, wet and wild stories to? I wish I could say this was an indication Kovacs is an unreliable narrator who is far too into himself, but the rest of the book is presented as fact. I just picture the interviewer or amanuensis's horrified face as Kovacs wades into excruciating details about glands and secretions and thrusting and moaning. Hope they were paid well.

The message is presented with a little more nuance here than in Altered Carbon, even if the message itself is still not terribly subtle. In Altered Carbon, it was 'rich=bad, so rise up and murder the bastards.' Here, corporations that profit from war are in the target sights, but so are fanatics who use their revolutionary fervor to justify their revolting actions. It's balanced, but it does rather mean it reaches conclusions as trite as 'war is bad,' 'ruthless companies are bad' and 'fanaticism is bad.'

All that said, this is my favorite of the three Kovacs books. A sense of impending doom builds throughout the book, with the soldiers working to unravel the mystery before radiation unravels their DNA, culminating in an apocalyptic burst of action that is much more original and satisfying than, say, Altered Carbon's endless techno-ninja shenanigans. On the other hand, that does mean it's more slow-moving, which may test the patience of people expecting more of the same from the last book.

Altered Carbon: Episode 1

Title: Altered Carbon, Episode 1
Director: Miguel Sapochnik
Network: Netflix

The Basics

Based on the Richard K Morgan book of the same name.

Revolutionary idealist and guerrilla/rebel-turned-mercenary Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman) gets cornered and killed by government enforcers on an alien planet. Luckily, he and everyone else has a digitized backup of his brain (which makes zero sense), so 250 years later he is downloaded into the body of a 38-year-old Swedish-American actor who starred in the RoboCop reboot and Suicide Squad. Nice work if you can get it.

Turns out he's been sprung from digital prison by the richest man in the world and the best thing in HBO's "Rome" (Laurens Bancroft and James Purefoy, respectively) to solve the man's own murder. In return, he's offered a full pardon and (Dr Evil pose) ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Being a good revolutionary, he tells Mr 0.1% to go stuff himself, until he gets ambushed at his hotel by a posse of hitmen (see video). 

Also along for the ride is the detective assigned to the Bancroft case, Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) and a whole lot of boobies. 

Fist Impressions (sic)

It's so deliriously over the top in everything it does--like it's been adapted by a bunch of 16 year olds--that it's easy to forgive the clunky exposition and wooden acting.

Definitely the show seems to believe that more is more. For example, the above scene in the book involves just two hitmen, who get taken out by a single Gatling gun. Here, there's half a dozen who get blown to pieces in an extended bloodbath by TWO machine guns, plus the hotel AI bartender has a shotgun (which is obviously needed when you have two sentry guns firing 100 rounds a second each), plus Kovacs does a bunch of punching and kicking in the middle of the bulletstorm.

Same with the prologue. In the book, Kovacs gets ambushed by a couple of paramilitaries, who gun him down on the spot. In the show, there is an extended gun battle replete with people hiding from assault rifle bullets behind that byword for armor plating, a kitchen counter.

The sleazy sexiness is also in full Showgirls mode, with a surprisingly high number of tits on the screen at any given moment. Detective Ortega takes Kovacs for an expository drink at  a strip club, so if anyone asks why I was there, I'll tell them it's because I was solving JFK's murder.

Dialogue is clunky, as people stand around declaiming the backstory. Kinnaman is fine in the action scenes, but I wish the directors wouldn't ask him to do anything more complicated than punch things. He isn't quite nasty enough to pull off the go-fuck-yourself attitude of his lines, nor does he put enough menace into Kovacs' threats.

The Sights and Sound of Music

The music is loud and proud too, with some sudden & intrusive outbursts of pop songs throughout the episode. One erupts over scenes of Kovacs going on a bender (that was ironically one of the tamer scenes: drugs in Altered Carbon come in eyedroppers stolen from Looper, and Kinnaman plays "high" with a roundeyed dazed expression) where it fits, the second time over a cityscape scene where the saccharine tone was just out of place. 

It doesn't quite pull off the claustrophobic crowdedness or Escher-esque geometries of a cyberpunk city, and everything is way, way too clean -- partly due to budget I guess, but partly because the camera tends to switch from medium shot to close-up, never really pulling back to give us a sense of space, until it pulls aaaall the way out and the cityscape looks like a Christmas ornament. There's one or two scenes at the start of Kovacs' drug-fuelled adventure that get a little of the sense of scope... but there hasn't been anything too neato yet.

Finally, the politics of the book seem more or less present. The mega-rich "own everything now," including our bodies, and in Kovacs' case, even our souls. Indeed, it looks like this part is going to be played up even more than it was in the book, with Kovacs changed from follower of quasi-Mao/Ho Chih Minh figure Quellcrist Falconer, to an associate/contemporary. A few other changes from page to screen also reflect this new focus--Kovacs has changed from government enforcer gone rogue to out-and-out revolutionary.

Despite that, I'd actually say the politics of the show has been one of the more subtly done things, which isn't saying much for an episode that opens with a lesbian shower scene, letting you figure out for yourself the implications of economic inequality.

Anyway, I love to complain, but on balance it's shlocky good fun, that unlike Bright actually has some ideas in the background.

Asianwashing

That's the episode, now it's time to rant.

Before this came out there was the utterly predictable criticism of "whitewashing" the semi-Japanese main character, despite the fact that (A) said character's surname is Kovacs, and (B) the entire point of the series is that digitizing consciousness means what you look like is disconnected from who you are. But now that I've seen it, I must agree I am deeply disappointed in the choice of casting: You see, two actors play Kovacs' earlier (Asian) incarnations, Leonardo Nam and Will Yun Lee. His sister is played by Dichen Lachman. None of them are Japanese.

Joel Kinnaman playing a white guy I buy. But hiring Koreans and Nepalese to play the roles of Japanese characters smacks of the worst kind of racism: Do all Asians look the same? 

I'm not being facetious: every Japanese person I've ever talked to has been fine with Hollywood actors playing Asian roles, but incensed when Chinese are hired to play Japanese. It's all a matter of perspective. 

Now, that's a totally over the top overreaction, but illustrates the point: once you start insisting people of the correct ethnicity play every role, where does it stop? At some arbitrary line the actual people involved don't care about. 

I hate the creeping sensation that I'm becoming a get-off-my-lawn style old man, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that each generation is just as bigoted as the next, just about different things. Sigh. The perils of allowing the Internet to mediate your relationship with your own culture, I guess.

The Carbonist Manifesto (Now with added guns!)

Title: Altered Carbon
Author: Richard K Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

The insatiable appetite of streaming TV services has demanded another sacrifice, and the latest victim is "Altered Carbon," soon to be adapted into a 10-episode series for Netflix. Time then for a re-read and remind myself what the book was like.

It's a bit like virtual reality sex, all fun and squishy games until you stop and think about what you're doing, and realize your avant-garde adventure is just another adolescent masturbatory fantasy with cyberpunk juices splattered all over its face.

Which isn't to say it's bad, really, after all VR sex is still sex and Altered Carbon is very, very sexy.

The sexy star of this sexy book is Takeshi Kovacs, a soldier gone rogue who is killed in the book's prologue, which ordinarily would be a bit of a snag in the sexy heroics department. It's no barrier for our man Kovacs however, as he is held in a kind of digital prison until he's sprung by a 300-year-old moneybags named Bancroft, on the condition that he solve Bancroft's own murder.

The scifi concept here is digital immortality and the resulting malleability of the physical. People in Altered Carbon are implanted with a "cortical stack" at the base of the skull, which stores their personalities and memories, thereby uncoupling the self from the physical space it temporarily occupies. Bodies are now called "sleeves," as interchangeable as clothes or Star Wars movie directors. Crime is now punished by taking the offender out of their body and stuffing them in a server somewhere -- during which time their body can be bought and used by someone else.

So Kovacs is dead, but then downloaded into a new body, which used to be someone else's. Bancroft was murdered, and now his clone with memories from the last backup--48 hours before he was killed--wants to find out why.

It's kind of two books at once; on the one hand, a hard-boiled whodunit with a manly male hero and a body count that would make Tarantino blush, and on the other, a kind of anarcho-communist manifesto about the corrupting influence of wealth on institutions and the need for the common man to resist oppression.

The Detective Story

The first of those two books is huge fun for about the first half, embodying everything young boys dream about when they hear the word 'cyberpunk.' Kovacs blows people's heads off the way you or I shake hands, or rather the way we would if we were coked to the eyeballs and had the insatiable urge to shake hands with people every 30 seconds or so.

It's a very visceral book, describing in loving detail the impact of both sex and violence on human bodies in all their liquid glory. There's a torture scene involving blowtorches and soldering irons, for example, a Terminator-esque revenge sequence with multiple beheadings and solving the murder mystery requires a series of visits to whorehouses.

In support of all this mayhem there is the requisite hardware aplenty, described in techno-fetishistic detail, from poison-tipped flechette guns to "particle blasters" that operate like a cross between a laser gun and a blowtorch, from anti-gravity belts and stealth suits to custom-made bodies with enhanced reflexes.

All the frenetic action gets weighed down as the book progresses a bit, mainly for two reasons. One is an over-reliance on a limited number of set-pieces: Kovacs is pretty rubbish for a super-soldier, and gets repeatedly captured by the bad guys, leading to yet another last-minute rescue and/or escape, my word, what a surprise.

The other thing that drags it down is Kovacs himself, who isn't a terribly interesting fellow to spend any time with, possessing two essentially two narrative modes: psychopathic murderer and Red Brigade firebrand, a sort of Zack de la Rocha dropping real bombs rather than the lyrical kind.

Making him a super-soldier is part of the fantasy, I know, but executed a bit ham-handedly here. Kovacs is an ex-"Envoy", a kind of special forces soldier whose speciality is that they can be downloaded into any available body and immediately be ready to fight. Which doesn't sound like much of a superpower, to be honest, but it's used as an excuse to provide Kovacs with all kinds of plot-convenient abilities written off as "Envoy conditioning," "Envoy intuition," "Envoy training," and "Envoy wisdom." 

Morgan-Leninism

The moralizing in the book is a lot less fun than the action. Socio-politics is explored with all the subtlety of a Rage Against the Machine song, as Morgan foresees that digital immortality will accelerate the accumulation of wealth among the rich and old, leading to decadence and the careless brutalization of anyone who gets in their way.

The central message is, in the book's own words, that the political is personal. If you are victimized by systems or institutions, you should be outraged and fight back. Acceptance of unfairness is cowardice. Cue particle blasting.

The commodification of the body and the idea that under late-stage capitalism we don't even own ourselves is here made explicit: we're all whores of one kind or another. I'd be more sympathetic if Morgan's prescription wasn't quite so bloodthirsty.

I note with cynical sadness that this book appears to get a pass in progressive circles for wearing its anti-establishment sympathies on its sleeve (pun intended), despite the Cro-Magnon gender politics very much on display. Kovacs meets two key women in the course of the story, whose breasts have bigger arcs than their characters, and Kovacs does some vivid, energetic bonking with both of them (or all four, if you like).

In addition, all this moralizing relies on world-building that doesn't stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny (such as: having a digital backup wouldn't save you from dying, such as: why do even the poorest of the poor have this technology, such as: the people's champion Kovacs spends most his time living on other people's money).

Still, I give it points for trying and not copping out and going the "it's just mindless action" route. Morgan has a point that he wants to make, and if he preaches it with machine gun intensity and repetition, well good for him.

Can't say I'm a convert, but it's largely a fun ride that leaves you sated, if feeling a little dirty. So yeah, pretty much like sex.