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.
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