61 pages • 2-hour read
Altered Carbon
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence and physical abuse.
The Songspire Tree
The songspire tree symbolizes humanity’s altered relationship with time, which is fostered by the technology that allows consciousness to be transferred, thereby essentially eradicating death. Kovacs first sees the tree when Miriam takes him on a tour of Suntouch House. When he notices it, she explains that the tree’s fame comes not only from its size, smell, and sounds, but also from its unnatural age. She says: “[T]hey grow to be a hundred meters tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root […]. From the erosion patterns, we think that most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might only have been around since the foundation of the Roman Empire” (25). Initially, Miriam presents it as an ancient artifact, saying that the trees, like the one in front of them, can be older than much of known human history. However, she puts this specific tree’s age in perspective by saying it is only as old as the Roman Empire, which itself is thousands of years old. This comparison and her nonchalant attitude toward the tree’s age echoes how the Bancrofts and other Meths see time. They live for hundreds of years, witnessing major changes to their societies and planets while remaining stationary and unmoved by history, much like the tree itself.
Cigarettes
Cigarettes are a motif that reflect the theme of The Instability of Identity Across Different Bodies, capturing how Kovacs struggles to integrate himself and his history into a new sleeve or body that has its own memories. When Kovacs first wakes up in his new sleeve, he is surprised that he is craving a cigarette. Though he has no memory of being a smoker, he learns that he is inhabiting Ryker’s body, and Ryker was a smoker. His craving for cigarettes demonstrates that Kovacs is not fully in control of his body. In virtual reality, where smoking can cause no physical harm, Kovacs accepts a cigarette from Ortega, and he says, “the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy” (159). The rush he experiences from the nicotine is not part of Kovacs’s prior habits or identity; instead, it is a physical memory from Ryker’s sleeve.
Throughout Altered Carbon, the cigarettes underscore a larger tension: Kovacs faces the dilemma of negotiating his own identity in Ryker’s body, He discovers the ways in which the body and its own memories impact how he perceives the world and other people. The draw to cigarettes is replicated in Kovacs’s attraction to Ortega, who is Ryker’s former lover. He realizes his desire for her is entangled with his body’s inherited muscle memories and unresolved emotional residues. Cigarettes become a marker of how embodiment complicates the boundary between self and other.
The Telescope
Laurens Bancroft’s telescope, dusty and unused, is a symbol of the moral stagnation brought on by extreme longevity, echoing The Impact of Immortality on Ethics. When Kovacs first visits Suntouch House, Laurens shows him the telescope and explains that he has not looked at it in hundreds of years. Later in the novel, when Kovacs returns, he sees the telescope again and reflects on what Laurens must have once seen through it, like “the tiny motes of light that were Earth’s first hesitant steps beyond the limits of the solar system. Fragile arks carrying the recorded selves of a million pioneers” (271). This image of early exploration emphasizes a time when humanity used technology for collective progress and to expand their engagement with the universe. In contrast, the Meths are now self-obsessed and indifferent to events that affect humanity as a whole.
Further solidifying the association of the telescope with Meth indifference, Kovacs realizes that the telescope was used recently and looks into it. He sees that it is not focused on distant stars but on the luxury brothel, Head in the Clouds, which is a site of exploitation and abuse. The contrast between the intended use of the telescope for cosmic exploration and Laurens’s using it for voyeuristic indulgence highlights the moral decline of the Meths over centuries of unchecked power. Once a symbol of wonder and exploration, the telescope now represents the insularity and depravity of those who have turned inward, consumed by hedonism and selfishness.
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