#ALTERED CARBON BOOK SERIES#

This may be largely due to his status as an Envoy, a now extinct breed of super-soldiers who have enhanced senses, pattern recognition abilities, and the ability to control their physiological and psychological responses. Important women in his life, for example, such as Reileen (Dichen Lachman of Dollhouse) and Quell (Renée Elise Goldsberry of The Good Wife) haunt his thoughts and motivate his actions, but he mostly accepts his new life with all of its strings attached after only cursory objections. Kinnaman’s performance in the opening episodes viewed for this review is strong but largely emotionally detached, which may seem strange given what is seen in flashbacks of his earlier life when Kovacs was in his original body, enacted by Will Yun Lee ( Falling Water). It takes no more time to accommodate this new vocabulary than it takes to realize that Bay City, the setting of the show, is the equivalent of what in our time is known as San Francisco. For example, the data contained in the cortical stack, which all citizens have installed in the base of their skulls at age 1, contains a person’s DHF, or digital human freight - the sum of their entire consciousness. Those parenthetical terms may seem daunting, but the techno-jargon takes surprisingly little time to get used to, and the future world the show takes place in is immediately immersive. Since Bancroft died before a 48-hour backup could be made of his consciousness, his new sleeve has no memory of the event. Starring Joel Kinnaman ( The Killing) as Takeshi Kovacs, whose memory (or “cortical stack”) has been placed in a new body (or “sleeve”) after serving 250 years of an eternal prison sentence, Altered Carbon follows the investigation for which Kovacs has been revived (or “spun up”): to find the murderer of Laurens Bancroft, played by James Purefoy ( Hap and Leonard). Fortunately, Altered Carbon succeeds on its own many merits, not just because of the dearth of competition.

#ALTERED CARBON BOOK SERIES#

The television landscape hasn’t yet spawned any classics of this particular sci-fi sub-genre the way cinema has with the likes of Blade Runner or even the more controversial Ghost in the Shell (although some are in the works), so the field is wide open for this series in which minds are downloaded into new bodies to prolong life. Morgan’s definitive novel on Netflix, is not up for question. The hunger with which fans of cyberpunk will devour Altered Carbon, the noir adaptation of Richard K.

Altered carbon book