the future includes sex, guns, drugs, and body-swapping.

so i gave you some "girly" recommendations; now let's hear it for the boys. i read Altered Carbon in college, and once i had finished with all the rest of school's requirements, i read the other two books in this trilogy. i must say, holy stinking piles, batman. i understand (but am a bit terrified) why this story has been purchased by some sort of film industry for the making-into-a-movie action they tend to do to ruin so many books these days. silly kids, hollywooding my precious business. richard morgan is going to be filthy stinking rich, and he's not even old! kinda seth mcfarlane-lookin, huh. morgan's british though. anywho.

here's the deal. it's in the future, and our main character is a ... mercenary of sorts. his name is takeshi kovacs (pronounced TALK-eh-she KO-vatch). he used to be this super hardcore special ops marine type soldier guy, and now he's just a disturbed badass. dude's rad. and crazy. but he's not the most interesting thing about this book/series. the crazysauce is that in this future, one's consciousness is stored in a lil chip, like a harddrive. all your memories, your identity, per se, is all on this "cortical stack" in your brainstem. sounding like another book at all? it's not the same at all, don't worry. 

the kicker is that, should you die, your little chip can be inserted into another body. continue where you left off. or whenever your last 'upload' was. now, this new body could be a clone of you, another body like the one you were born with, or it could be some other body. you could potentially transfer everything there is about you into a body of the opposite sex, at any age. for instance, at one point our protagonist is reanimated into a body that was a smoker. so he's irritable until he figures this out, and then he's a trying-to-quit smoker for a while. 

this body issue is, by far, the awesomest idea i've come across in a long while, and i'll get into why a little farther down the page, but first, more about the story, cuz i think i've yet to hook you.

let me begin some hooking with this here fan art. reasons you will like this book include:

• badass dude with guns and super enhanced muscles and fighting SKILLZ
• who pretty much can't die
• and is a little crazy. 
• fight scenes so rad you'll think The Matrix was boring (note: if you liked The Matrix, you will like this book)
• travel between planets
• interplanetary turmoil
• body modifications with technology that give you extra 'powers' 
• crazy drugs do weird stuff with your body technologies
• like make sex crazy steamy
• crazy steamy sex scenes
• psychological issues 
• related to the whole body thing
• and unrelated to the whole body thing
• mysteries!
• the ability to insert a consciousness into a simulation and do just about anything to them
• like torture - they can't die! just go insane.. 
• or fun stuff
• or a whole ton of planning and chatting for days or weeks while only passing a few minutes in the 'real world'
• whole religions, economies, and philosophies developed around these new crazy technologies
• for instance, the hardcore religious types believe the soul cannot be contained in technology, so if one of them dies, even if their 'stack' is in tact, they are not to be placed in a new body. they're d-e-d, dead.
• also, of course, only those who can afford it can get new bodies if they die - and you have to be pretty stinking rich to get clones of yourself, so the moderately rich get bodies unlike their own.

ok, enough for now. i think you're titillated. on to the whole consciousness-in-a-chip/body-swapping issue, and its implications. this is something the author doesn't explore as much as i wish he did, but it certainly gets those mind grapes juicing. can you sense i'm going to get all existential on ya? you have such good senses.

where, when, and who am i?

consider: our protagonist is already over 100 years old. his body looks, oh, say, 30? who knows how many times his body has died. but he has memories from decades ago, on this and other planets, and, unlike most people around him, was actually born on Earth. (oh yeah, we've totally colonized lotsa other planets by now, don't you fret.) he has memories of wars. lots of them. of aliens. of loves and losts. of death. a lot of death. 

in a great movie that you should see called 13 Conversations About One Thing, a character raises his glass and says to another, "may you get everything you want," and he and his friend joke that this is an old gypsy curse (not unlike 'careful what you wish for'). ah, to live forever. but we've seen it again and again in great literature, the curse that is eternal life. you only really begin to see it later in the series, but takeshi starts to go batshit crazy from all his past - that's just too much past for one person. 

not to mention, it is (as it always has been) the rich who inherit the earth. or, planet, as the case may be - Earth is long gone. though the technologies are available to everyone, these things have their price. a well-to-do person could have a whole warehouse of cloned bodies, as well as a number of backup servers to ensure his constant survival. what's to keep those old rich farts from getting older and richer, and gaining too much power? what IS too much power? who's going to keep tabs on these old crazies? and of course, what about the poor sap who gets caught in the crossfire of a gang fight, whose stack was totally transferable, but whose family couldnt foot the bill for a new body? peace out, dude. 

worse still, what of the guy who said 'no seriously, keep my stack around til my funds can cover a new body,' so the government hung on to the thing, and plopped him in a new body 150 years later? this guy has no family, no friends, and might even be on a different planet, and he's in an unfamiliar shell. hrm.

or, even, what if the stack is in tact and in holding, or just in the body still, but the body is dead, can't afford a new body, or chose not to... is he still there? in nothingness? in a sort of purgatory? could he be placed into a new body should someone try that experiment in a couple decades? would he still be a person? a sane person? does one have to destroy the stack to 'release' the actual person?

there is one scene where a guy who was in prison [prison is all psychological, no body attached. your consciousness is pretty much just suspended on hold til your time is up, then you get a body.) gets out and goes to see his wife. there is mention that, even though she knows immediately that it's him and they're madly in love, blah blah blah, she felt like she was cheating on him because of the new body. oOoooo....

and.. where are my important bits?

further, the idea that your memories = you... interesting. you see, if you can store everything that equals you in this little chip, that means our bodies really are just vessels. we are not a part of them. this gets back to the question of 'where does my essence lie?' if you cut off my arm, i say, 'that is my arm, but i am me.' if you cut off my head, would i say 'that is my head, but i am me'? so then, does the 'soul' reside in the head? is the 'stack' just the human invention to embody the soul? 

the religious fanatics in the story obviously don't think so. they think your body is you, and if it dies, you're gone. crush that backup file, i'm outta here. but wait! we already have synthetic everything-parts! anyone seen Bicentennial Man? if you have a metal leg, a plate in your head, two hearing aids, glasses, and a pig's heart.. are you still human? what makes us human? if you have someone else's body, are you still you? what happens if you put a 'stack' in an animal? (this is touched on briefly in simulation in the series.) is any of this reminding you of Blade Runner? aka, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (which was written by Phillip K. Dick, after whom the Phillip K. Dick Award was named, which Richard K. Morgan won for Altered Carbon, btw. something about a middle name beginning with K...)

SKADOOSH!!! that was your head exploding. so awesome. i got some shrapnel. sure do love these questions. anywho, if you dig these ideas, or even just the rad 'film noir' meets dick tracy style of this book, i suggest you continue with the series. don't worry, two more! Woken Furies, and Broken Angels. here's the author's website, if you feel so inclined.