Having read the book, all I can say is: ugh.
Maybe they won't fuck it up, but the trailer does not give me high hopes. Altered Carbon is about a future where bodies are meaningless (they are called "sleeves"). Everyone gets a thumb drive implanted at birth, which backs up your consciousness. If your body dies, or if you just want to upgrade, you can have it moved to a new sleeve. Biotechnology is such that human bodies are grown, cloned, and customized to order. The wealthy can be truly immortal of they want to be: remote backups conducted daily, with multiple bodies on ice just waiting.
But where it gets interesting is in the context. In this universe, we have faster-than-light communications but not travel. The main character, Takashi Kovacs, is a former Envoy. These guys are SEALs mixed with shamans, but in a hard sci-fi setting. There's no magic or anything, but bodies can't be transported across stellar distances. But we can transmit information, and since sleeves can be changed at will, this means you need people who can be dumped into a new body on an alien world and dropped into combat or espionage with immediate effect. Their ability to read and manipulate people is such that they're banned from elected office. They're basically Jason Bourne + a mentat from Dune + Hannibal Lector rolled into one person.
The other thing is that the main character and the books generally are very cynical about power structures. There's a lot of underlying social tensions along familiar lines. Another fun conceit is that the first book takes place on Earth, which is kind of a backwater by this point (the book takes place in the early 31st century).
Here is an excerpt from the book.
Don't get me wrong, faithfulness to source material doesn't per se make something good. But the trailer makes it look way too action-focused, and like they've sacrificed most of what makes that source material interesting. Instead, we have something that looks liks generic sci-fi shooty show #137.
I'll give it a shot, but am not holding out much hope.
P.S. Typing anything remotely long-form on this site remains as big of a pain in the ass as always.
I ended up with more or less the same first impression. At least based on the trailer, Altered Carbon looks like it's got a bad case of modern Hollywood; everything is extremely polished, but unmoving to the point of banality. Fairly few movies or TV shows evoke any sort of more complex emotions beyond love, hate, hope, happiness, sadness, jumpscares (and specifically not, like, gaze-into-the-abyss existential horror.) What the majority of producers is optimizing for is ROI; you get more eyeballs the more digestable your product is. And, I mean, there's nothing wrong with movies or shows that are just entertaining. Entertainment doesn't have to be "challenging", it's just that I'd love it if there was more stuff out there that really sort of wrenches you. The sort of narrative that leaves you feeling like crying after it's over, or that deals with something taboo (how often do you see e.g. men crying due to fear?)
I agree. It's kind of like the obesity epidemic, though. Economics aside, we're evolutionarily hard-wired to go for ROI (in terms of benefit per unit of energy expenditure). Once you've had a taste of that easy-but-empty fix (distinguishable from narcotics only by degree), it's very hard to re-train yourself to go for something heavier. As with anything it's balance, but it takes a lot of work to maintain.
What's the problem?Typing anything remotely long-form on this site remains as big of a pain in the ass as always.
The fact that the post page expires about a few minutes, so if it takes you longer to type anything, you have to copy-and-paste it into a new one.
Agreed. A session counter or extending the session would do the long-writers a favor. mk
Nah, I'm fine with markdown (even if this site uses a non-standard version for some reason). I do most of my word processing these days in Typora, which is markdown-based.