I prefer the screen adaptation

When borrowing ebooks from your local library, always double check the publishing format before you set it on your hold list. Discovering Altered Carbon only came in EPUB and was therefore inaccessible on my Kindle was not fun. But that’s neither here nor there.

In between the time when I put this on my hold list and the time I finally got it, I watched the full first season of the show on Netflix and I really enjoyed it! It’s definitely not one of their higher-tier offerings, but it was a decent way to waste time on the couch and unwind after work. It hews fairly faithfully to the book, turns out, and I gotta say, I like the show better.

Quick plot: hundreds (thousands?) of years in the future, humanity has developed technology that allows for a person’s memories/personality/”soul” to be downloaded onto a chip installed at the back of the neck. That chip can be removed and inserted in a new body at any time, if you can afford it. These bodies are called sleeves and while “organic damage” is a crime, it pales in comparison to destroying someone’s chip (“stack”) – Real Death. It also allows for the extraordinarily wealthy to be essentially immortal. Takeshi Kovacks, our anti-hero, is a highly trained, elite supersoldier who went bad and was sent to future prison. He’s legally sprung from the joint and leased out to one of these mega wealthy types to act as personal investigator and figure out how he (temporarily) wound up dead.

The idea is that bodies can be more or less meaningless but the execution is a lot of detailed descriptions of bodies that leave me wondering if Morgan has ever actually seen a woman before or if he just dreams of them constantly. In the book, Kovacks comes off largely as wish fulfillment (“Get this – he’s a badass broody super soldier AND all the chick wanna bang him”). I found that I really preferred the changes the show made – specifically with the Big Bad and with the hotel and I guess with his “team”. Okay the more I typed that sentence the more examples I came up with. Yeah, you can skip this one and watch the show.