Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan

This book is squarely in the Cyberpunk tradition. Am reading it 23 years after publication for a book club. The author's take on personal identity and its technical instatiation is interesting and relevant, but the sex, violence, and sexual torture in the book mean there's plenty of reasonable, otherwise not overly sensitive people that just aren't going to get past it. The reviews show that quite well, with some loving and some hating it.

The book is crudely and directly written, and again that's going to mean some love it and some hate it. On the upside, the directness means the interesting speculation on identity is easy to follow. It's right in the title--the Altered Carbon is the stack, the place where your memories, experiences and personalities are stored, and it can be retrieved and placed in another body if it's not damaged. By social convention this downloaded set of personal details is the "person", and a person can be put in a new body and recognized as a continuation of the same legal person. There's a lot of good ideas around this--the author touches on many of the questions I had (How does the "sleeve" (the new body) affect the identity of the downloaded person? What happens when the same person is downloaded into a second body simultaneously?).

The interstellar aspect of the book is not that important to at least this installment of the series. The protagonists could as easily have been from different countries as different worlds. Maybe it figures more later.

Overall a highly flawed and interesting book.

My Goodreads Review

Everything You Ever Wanted, by Luiza Sauma

I'm going to give this a 3.5 and round up. There's a lot to appreciate in this book. The author's description of our protagonist's (Iris Cohen) life is the perfect buildup to her decision to emigrate to Nyx. She leads an apparently privileged (she has a job that pays enough for her to live decently and party) but absolutely hellish (meaningless work, meaningless relationships, drinks hard and eats horribly because all her friends do and then feels awful later) life. She hates what she does and it seems like an endless treadmill. Her family relationships are not enough to keep her there. Though she would have liked them to be. So off she goes.

The world of Nyx seems artificially constrained in a way that makes it feel like it's fake. Sauma spends no time explaining the science at all, just says one gets there through a wormhole and briefly describes what it looks like. It's all about what Iris goes through. The participants are weirdly cut off--they can (and are required to) post about their lives on social media, but they are not allowed contact with Earth and so never get feedback on what they are doing.

You keep waiting for the book to relent, and it never does. Once the perspective shifts fully to Nyx, the situation just grinds all the participants down until everyone is dead. Iris is hopeful at the beginning, Nyx seems to strip away all the distractions that kept her from having a good life. But the social media and livestream lose support and eventually the colony goes downhill. One expects a reveal or a rescue and it never happens. At the end I reflected on the book and it made me incredibly sad. It also reminded me of the early American colonies--some ended exactly this way, and for most it was a one-way trip with little to no contact with those they left behind..

The writing is excellent and I feel like I understand Iris. It's not a book to lift your spirits but it's worthwhile.

My Goodreads Review