Book Review: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Which is better? Book or TV show?

Warning: Do not read if you want to be surprised by either the book or Netflix series.

This is the first major work of fiction I read after being convinced by a writing professor that the “which is better: book or movie” debate operates on a flawed premise because each medium has its unique offerings that cannot be fairly compared to another medium. With that delineation in mind, here is a review of the book Altered Carbon with hopefully a more accurate comparison to the TV series.

To put this in context, this was Richard Morgan’s debut novel, published in 2001. The Netflix series was produced in 2017. That’s an eternity in technological advances, and the story is very much about tech development.

Craft above all else

For a debut novel, the originality is out of this world (pun intended). To dream up a futuristic world where human consciousness is stored on a chip, and therefore achieves an effective immortality as long as that chip (or the data on it) remains intact — and then have the body be simply an “outfit of the day” — is remarkable, especially considering it was thought out in 1990. Today, it almost seems like a foregone conclusion because cloud computing is the norm, but it was not back when Richard Morgan wrote the book.