61 pages • 2-hour read
Altered Carbon
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, death, death by suicide, sexual violence, and physical abuse.
The Impact of Immortality on Ethics
Altered Carbon explores how practical immortality erodes moral responsibility and deepens class stratification. In this society, human consciousness is stored in cortical stacks and can be downloaded into “sleeves,” which could be real or synthetic bodies. This innovation prolongs lifespans indefinitely but in ways that are unevenly distributed. Access to immortality is largely dependent on wealth and power: The ultra-rich maintain banks of clones and can afford frequent resleeving. For everyone else, the prolonging of life is dependent on their ability to afford new sleeves, which can be rented or recycled bodies. This system creates a greater distance between the wealthy and the poor, as a person’s body comes to reflect their economic status. The rich can immediately identify those who cannot afford expensive sleeves and come to see them as less than human.
Ortega believes that this imbalance corrupts the rich. She says: “You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t really matter anymore” (53). According to her, their extended lives distort their perspective. This corruption is embodied by Laurens Bancroft, who routinely kills himself and restores into copies of his own body with little regard for the lives disrupted in the process. Additionally, Reileen Kawahara kills sex workers in her brothels for entertainment because it is cheaper than providing customers with virtual experiences. She is confident that the law will defer to the wealthy and allow her to bury digital evidence of her transgressions.
Thus, the wealthy manipulate legal frameworks to shield themselves, ensuring that their crimes and excesses carry no consequences. Kovacs recognizes that their ability to circumvent the law and accountability is not merely because they have the money to bury their transgressions, but also because they have the power to write laws that benefit them. For instance, he learns that the penalties for deploying biological or digital weapons apply only to common civilians. He points out: “In the event of the virus actually being deployed, the sentence could be upped to erasure. Naturally these penalties were applicable only to private citizens, not military commanders or government executives. The powerful are jealous of their toys” (264). The wealthy and powerful are therefore able to commit atrocities that would mean death for ordinary citizens. When Kovacs ultimately unleashes a weaponized virus to take down Reileen Kawahara, he does so knowing the consequences of this act—it is punishable by Real Death. Yet, such an act would carry no consequences for someone in power. In this world, the justice system is structurally rigged to preserve the violent indulgences of the elite.
The Instability of Identity Across Different Bodies
The novel explores how bodily interchangeability fractures identity. Kovacs resleeves into multiple bodies through the course of the novel, yet he struggles to adjust every time since he experiences deep psychological dislocation with each switch. Upon waking in Elias Ryker’s body, he describes the experience of looking in a mirror for the first time through new eyes: “For the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s almost tactile” (12). The psychological jolt he describes underscores the disconnect between his interiority and his new body. He must then learn how to function in his new body, learning its limitations and feeling the legacies of its habits.
The process of resleeving affects individuals differently, depending on their wealth and status. The wealthy are able to afford exact clones of themselves, which gives them a firmer grasp on their identity. However, those who cannot afford this must get accustomed to the bodies they get. Even their families and partners must adjust to the shock of meeting their loved ones in a new body. At other times, people see new persons inhabiting the body of someone who was their family or partner, and this is another type of disorienting experience. For instance, after his wife is put under, Elliot sees her sleeve on TV since someone else rented it out. His daughter, Elizabeth, becomes so disturbed by this that she turns to sex work to try and buy the sleeve back for her mother.
Kovacs and Ortega must grapple with this shift in identity and appearance when Kovacs inhabits the body of Ortega’s lover, Ryker. Ortega constantly tries to remind herself that the person in front of her is not the man she loves. Kovacs, conversely, finds himself attracted to Ortega, and this is not entirely of his own volition. As he admiringly observes Ortega walk across a room, he notes that “it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home” (247). Ryker’s body responds before Kovacs’s mind can catch up, blurring the line between his self and his sleeve. Later, when Kovacs occupies a different sleeve, he finds that his attraction to Ortega weakens. This forces him to confront whether his feelings are his own or if they were echoes of Ryker’s love and attraction for Ortega. His experiences reveal that identity is not purely cognitive but is deeply embodied.
The Thin Line Between Justice and Revenge
In Altered Carbon, the societal divide between the powerful and the disadvantaged is explored through Kovacs’s perception of justice. His personal moral code blurs the line between justice and revenge, particularly when institutions like the law fail at accountability. He is heavily influenced by Quellcrist Falconer, a revolutionary figure who argues that the system is irredeemably corrupt and promotes the use of force to overcome injustices. Falconer preaches: “Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can” (131). In the novel, justice is dictated, defined, and doled out by the wealthy and powerful, while they insulate themselves from ever facing accountability for their own crimes.
Falconer’s words become Kovacs’s credo, and he feels a burning desire for revenge. He not only wants to obtain justice for those who were wronged, but he also wants retribution on those committed the wrong. His perception of justice is not merely one defined by the law, as he often goes above and beyond the scope of the law. He even jeopardizes any chance at formal justice so that he can get his personal revenge. This is especially true when he discovers that Reileen Kawahara, his former Envoy commander and lover, has been using her immortality to exploit and kill without consequence.
Kovacs’s final confrontation with Kawahara is driven by personal grief as well as political conviction. In his mind, Kovacs connects Jimmy, his Envoy comrade who was subjected to torture and driven to suicide, with the many women Kawahara has abused. He sees them all as victims of a careless elite. He declares:
[I]t was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung heap of history. For all these […] someone was going to pay” (312).
Kovacs’s primary motivation is revenge rather than justice, as he is personally angered by these injustices. He does not coordinate with Ortega to stop Reileen Kawahara through legal prosecution or institutional justice. Rather, in an act of vigilante reckoning, he delivers judgment on her because he believes no one else will. This fusion between his personal pain and public rebellion also collapses the distinction between justice and revenge. Since he believes he inhabits a system where power nullifies accountability, Kovacs sees revenge as the only form of justice that he can effectively pursue.
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