Altered Carbon – All the DNA of great science-fiction with some missing links
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In particular, there's a certain traumatized daughter whose plot never makes sense at any turn. The show seems to expect us to already know and have a major emotional investment in a character who we've never seen speak and who seems to have almost no tangible relationship to anything else happening in the show. Plus the way other characters react to what's going on with her is completely nonsensical.
The show has plenty of issues but that one in particular really bothered me for some reason.
I put this show in the camp good concepts, good visuals, decent fights, but the characters are just along for whatever ride the writers want to take them on.
Also, the plot had my eyes rolling a little too often for my taste. Much of the future tech ended up being a hammer that could force the story through any hole they wanted while other elements didn't make sense to exist in the way they were portrayed.
The Raven AI was cool, but their weak excuse for how those constructs were neglected and not used everywhere didn't make any sense given his role as the story played out.
The only lesser part for me wasn’t the story but the technology. I’m ok with unexplained advanced tech, but it has to make sense. Why are the only things run by advanced better-than-human AI’s hotels and brothels? Why is it so trivial to transfer minds between bodies but so difficult to make a simple backup? Why are prosthetic replacement arms so powerful they can crush metal, and why if that tech is available don’t the special ops use bodies which are all-prosthetic? Too many things didn’t make sense.
The stack backup reasoning is lame, "too expensive" is not really defining, and if a stack can be transferred to another stack, having two with one in a strongbox seems logical. You possibly lose memories then, but live on. It seems to come down mostly to money and socioeconomic disparity. At one point someone says, fixing a broken leg is too expensive. That's ridiculous
The vast majority of SF uses technologies as cool set props for minor variations on familiar kinds of stories and social dynamics. Star Trek was/is terrible about this too. It's hard for a creator to model the higher-order effects that would be introduced from (e.g.) starships, teleporters, AI, or what-have-you. Do that hard work too well and most of the audience won't be able to understand what's going on without lengthy infodumps. The only current show I can think of that tries to show how technologies could drastically change societies is Black Mirror. Almost everything else is "familiar social dynamics, Amazing Gizmos are just props for the adventure." The proportion of internally consistent works is somewhat higher in written SF, but I'd say over half still follows the Amazing Gizmos Somehow Leave Society Basically Familiar template.
Also, One day I realized, how does the Klingon disintegrator ray stop at the soles of the boots? It never disintegrates the floor.)
Much the same as how most people today don't talk about how 4G works, or how pressurisation on an airliner prevents them from asphyxiating. Until it stops working, like in Star Trek VI...
My point is that of all the futuristic fictional technologies that ST presents and deals with: teleporters, replicators, phasors, warp drive, etc... they never ever even mention the artificial gravity. (Spoiler alert: There is one part in one of the movies where the bad guys turn it off on a ship during an attack. But still no one actually talks about it.)
Arguably, gravity control would be a huge thing (Larry Niven has a book where one of the characters has developed g.c. and done spectacular things with it.)
Since it is so trivial to fake video evidence or transfer to a new body, why would a video confession have any value? And why on earth are their bank accounts DNA-locked when they can and do change bodies like they change cloths?
In the future so technologically advanced, why would a contract need to be physically printed and stamped?
Who holds the power in this universe? One episode Meths are gods, untouchable by mere mortals. The next, police show up and easily arrest not one, but two of them. One week a nobody can slaughter an entire clinic and walk away with impunity, the next a Meth is arrested for what can be arguably called a manslaughter, under influence no less. Who is the ultimate untouchable, Meths or CTAC? It seems it changes from episode to episode.
If people can live in the virtual, why wouldn't more people do so instead of simply dying? Living in the virtual should cost nothing or close to nothing. Why isn't everyone who can't afford a new body at the end of their natural lifespan simply move to virtual for the rest of eternity, or until they gather enough money for a new body?
I can go on and on. Nothing about the show made sense. The visuals were great, but everything else was terribly lacking.
Why would someone who is effectively immortal care if a body was destroyed?
Aside from "plot point", why was the update of the meth's upload 48 hours? Why not also local, and uploaded to the cloud?
For anyone who can upload, which seems everyone except Catholics (plot point), why can't people trade bodies as needed? 7 year old gets old person body - why can't they trade as needed?
And of course, add in the appropriate amounts of violence and "Game of Thrones" forced sexuality. I guess pandering to the masses is a thing. :/
Why would someone who is effectively immortal care if a body was destroyed?
Doesn't seem so weird. Bancroft has no memory of being in a suicidal frame of mind, he has a lot of enemies, and somehow his last body ended up destroyed with his own weapon inside his secure mansion. It doesn't matter that it's impossible to really end him by destroying that one body. It should have also been impossible for one of his enemies to destroy that one body in those circumstances. As long as Bancroft isn't convinced of the suicide or wife-did-it explanations he's going to care a lot about how that body ended up dead.
I don't accept that.
Sure, video can be forged or deleted. But we can even solve that by spooling to write-once read only systems. A dot matrix printer is an early form of that for Syslog. Hard for a hacker to 'hack' a printout. Or, in this case, whatever techno-magical hardware can be used.
And regarding killing his body and device, all he needs to do is increase the update frequency and make it realtime backup for his residence. Then, no mystery. He'd remember.
Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams, however, is worthwhile and a nice bookend to the new season of Black Mirror.
I fully underline your statement regarding PKD's Electric Dreams as well as all the Black Mirror seasons. Furthermore, let us not forget that several other of PKD's works have seen a movie adaptations. I can recommend Total Recall (both; watch older first), Blade Runner (both; watch older first), A Scanner Darkly (if you can stand the art style; personally, I loved it), Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau (Screamers was OKish). There are series adaptations as well. Check Wikipedia for all the adaptations [1]
I'm not aware of any motion picture adaptations of Stephenson's or Gibson's works. Although I just found out via Wikipedia that the game Netrunner [2] is a derivative work of the Sprawl trilogy, and also The Matrix heavily "drawn" from the Sprawl trilogy as well [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_b...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android:_Netrunner
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Literary_and_cultu...
Well, for what it's worth, there is Johnny Mnemonic, which wasn't very well received although I personally liked it. Another short story set in the Sprawl, New Rose Hotel, was also adapted to a film (I haven't seen it), and many other works, including Neuromancer, have been in various stages of development for a while. More details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Film_adaptation...
From what I can tell nobody brought up David Cronenberg either. I liked his works [1] when I was younger (not sure if I still would now). I especially liked eXistenZ, but also Videodrome, The Fly, and Scanners.
I just started binge watching The Man In The High Castle and it exactly underlines my statement in my previous post: great storyline (IMO), but not depending much on CGI. I think if the story lacks, all you got going for it is CGI (or not if there is none). CGI may impress you when you're still young, but as you grow older you see through the façade. Especially when its overdone. Because older movies lack it, and therefore are rather limited (take for example old Star Wars which heavily used costumes, models, and camera tricks). It might feel a bit dated, if not just from the hair models. Yet sometimes the nostalgia hits the nail (such as in Black Mirror's San Junipero episode). Not exactly sure why. While I'm thoroughly enjoying The Man In The High Castle series my partner hates anything related to WWII so thats yet another series we cannot watch together.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cronenberg#As_director
One of the executive producers is David Ellison, son of billionaire Larry Ellison.
Another exec producer is James Vanderbilt, descendant of the Gilded Age Vanderbilts, once the wealthiest family in America.
There's some overlap with virtual reality themes from Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Dichen Lachman has a role in both shows.
Worst change from the book: Making Quellcrist Falconer into a technophobe and the personal love interest of long-ago Kovacs. In the book she's a famous dead[1] figure from history who a) admirably fought on the losing side of a rebellion and b) wrote a lot of quotable things. She's like a cross between William Wallace and Sun Tzu. Falconer thought that her followers could play the long game against unjust power, since human immortality made time irrelevant; she didn't argue that immortality itself was wrong. In the series she's just that tired stock character, the pseudo-wise reactionary who argues that there are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.
In the book Kovacs seems to love Falconer's ideas, but she lived before him and they weren't a romantic item. He's not interested in personally trying to fight a rebellion against the whole Protectorate, either. He's just looking out for his own skin and a few people he cares about.
Making Rei into Kovacs's sister was unnecessary and again went directly against the tone of the original: it made Kovacs sad and conflicted instead of furious and calculating when it comes to permanently stopping her.
The series is visually gorgeous, and if you haven't come into the series with the expectation that the same ideas and noirish conventions will be maintained from the book (as I did), you may well enjoy it better for that.
[1] Yes, I read the later Woken Furies where Falconer seems to "come back" in a way, but an event from decades after Altered Carbon shouldn't have been shoehorned into the Altered Carbon adaptation this way. Or at least I thought it shouldn't have been.
Do you feel more satisfied with fiction when powerful villains are, by some miraculous stroke of luck, brought to justice? Or do you feel more satisfied with the logical consistency of stories where the powerful can mostly get away with crimes, because that's what power is?
The latter is more like the book and noir-ish fiction in general. I also prefer the latter, perhaps because the first is just so much more common. Maybe if the standard Hollywood ending had powerful villains crushing attempts to bring them to justice I'd have an affinity for "plucky underdog triumphs against the odds" stories. But the plucky underdog pulls off an improbable win so often in popular entertainment that I'm tired of it. To believe that underdogs are actually underdogs I need to see them lose more often than they win.
Given those two choices, I prefer logic. But, I would prefer justice if it wasn't "by some miraculous stroke of luck".
I'll check out the show first. I already have Netflix, but haven't bought the book yet.
For example the ending felt a bit like a false summit. Solving the Bancroft murder should have been the climax of this detective novel, but the story keeps going and feels awkward afterwards. I had forgotten how badly the story lost me in the books until I was watching this show and I couldn't remember what I should be caring about. You can't build climactic tension if the viewer isn't even sure what they should be tense about!
Setting aside content, I just want to say Poe's actor was fantastic, but Rei's actress just didn't deliver on the same level as the rest of the primary cast.
And the sets were amazing. Some of the best I've seen on a streaming-only show.
I know that this series is based on a book, and I have been looking for more sci-fi books to read. Does anyone have any insight on how the TV series compares to the book and whether it is worth reading?
I personally did read about half the book until I lost interest. So I guess the series and the book have that in common. Anyway, from what I've read the series is more or less true to the book, except from episode 7 when even I could notice some major differences (mainly the nature and motivations of the envoys).
The book is no masterpiece, not by a longshot, but it's a fun read and I think it's miles better than the show.
If you're interested in "people upload their conciousness" you might want to read some of Greg Egan's stuff. He's done a wider range, covering more situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading_in_fiction
> The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City (1994), Diaspora (1997) and Zendegi (2010), "copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed.
Sequel is a banger, though, I recommend it.
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