ABSTRACT
When in the 1980s and 1990s cyberpunk stormed through science fiction worlds and became the object of much critical attention and theorization, one of the flagship elements of its vision of near-future (post)humanity was the digitization of human consciousness foregrounding a Cartesian mind/ body duality. In fact, however, very few canonical cyberpunk texts explored short-and long-term ramifications of the digitally-transferable identity and none really offered its sustained discussions. Richard Morgan’s trilogyAltered Carbon (2002), Broken Angels (2003), Woken Furies (2005)— rectifies that absence but, in the process, departs from and undermines not only the Cartesian paradigm but cyberpunk aesthetics at large. Morgan’s narratives are set in a far-future galactic hegemony known as
the Protectorate, ostensibly a democratically-governed and economicallydriven political entity. The Protectorate was largely made possible and is held together by the technologies left behind by the ancient race of Martians, who exited the now human-controlled space at least 500,000 years prior to the commencement of Altered Carbon. The three volumes trace what for all purposes can be called the adventures of the titular Takeshi Kovacs, an erstwhile member of the elite Envoy Crops, shock-commandos maintaining order on the Settled Worlds. In the trilogy-opening Altered Carbon, as part of a parole deal, Kovacs becomes an investigator in a puzzling murder/suicide case on Earth involving Laurens Bancroft, an influential politician and businessman representing an aristocracy-like class of “Methuselahs” who have benefited the most from life-extension technologies. In Broken Angels, he is recruited into a private enterprise of recovering a Martian artifact on the war-ravaged planet of Sanction IV. Backed by an aggressive corporation, Kovacs and a group of special ops have to face both military and political threats. In Woken Furies, he becomes involved in an insurrection against the oppressive regime on his home Harlan’s World. Even these brief summaries reveal that Morgan mixes various genre influences, including elements that distance the novels from Gibson’s near-future cyberpunk poetics as defined, for example, by McHale or Hollinger, in favour perhaps of Sterling’s far-future cyberpunk poetics. While the general background of a galaxy-spanning political entity suggests space opera
tradition, individual novels engage other specific conventions-Altered Carbon, the futuristic noir; Broken Angels, the military novel; Woken Furies, a political discourse-which further complicates the identification of the novels with any single SF school. Morgan’s trilogy is for all purposes firmly rooted in cyberpunk aesthetics, because of both its construction of human subjectivity and its focus on the areas which have been traditionally asserted to be emblematic of cyberpunk. In canonical cyberpunk, the digitization of personality was the conceptual
cornerstone of narratives and manifested whenever human operators interfaced with virtual environments, but the actual technology behind the process was rarely invoked, not to mention explained. In Morgan’s fiction the technology receives far more attention. Central to it is the cortical stack, a small chip implanted in the upper spine at birth, which contains an accreting sum of personality, memories, and experience. As a container of everything that is permanent about individual subjectivity and that can be carried between subsequent sleeves, the stack becomes the metaphor of the subject and effectively the subject itself, although the physical chip merely houses the actual data constituting the mind. On the other hand, the stack is also an object-when disembodied, a stack-encoded personality becomes a commodity which can be exchanged, handled, and destroyed. An unfitted stack also entails the lack of consciousness of the recorded data, the state which even further contributes to its status as chattel. This commodification is best visualized in the Soul Market warehouse scene in Broken Angels: stacks of fallen soldiers are moved with cargo loaders and sold by weight to interested parties. Of ten kilograms of stacks which Kovacs and his partners purchase at the Market, only seven stacks become subsequently embodied and “resurrected”—the rest is “wastage” (Broken 98) calculated into such transactions. The bodily “sleeve” becomes even more objectified. Acquisition of any
replacement for the original body is entirely determined by technical requirements and personal finances. Also, the lack of terminological (all bodies are simply called “sleeves”) and experiential (the original is valued no more highly than subsequent sleeves) distinction between original and secondary bodies clearly indicates the repeatability and replaceability of embodiment. A sleeve is a commodity, often extremely valuable but hardly unique. True to cyberpunk fashion, sentient machines constitute a separate class
of agents. In Altered Carbon the hotel named Hendrix, in which Kovacs is staying, is a legal entity operating its own licensed business. Later in the same novel, during the raid that involves destruction of an AI-operated virtual brothel, Kovacs feels “a vague pang of guilt” as he is thinking about “the A.I., thrashing like a man in an acid vat as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shriveling down to a tunnel of closing perspectives into nothing” (Carbon 281). This image clearly indicates the recognition of machinic personhood even if at that moment the A.I. dissolves in an excruciating demise. Evolving and autonomous technology, one of the classic
cyberpunk topoi, exists here as well, most prominently in Woken Furies, where vast stretches of one of Harlan World’s continents have become, albeit not “deliberately,” what Gibson called an “unsupervised playground for technology” (Neuromancer 11)—at the time of the plot, hunting for constantly evolving machines in the Uncleared has been going on for close to 300 years and carries financial reward for each machinic death. Other defining elements of the Movement are also present. Although the
trilogy posits no world-spanning digital network, virtual environments abound, either in the form of constructs serving as prisons, in which the encoded subjectivity serves time; as holiday ersatz; as recovery wards for soldiers whose original sleeve has been rendered unfunctional and who are awaiting its repair or replacement; or, finally, as artificial h(e)avens like the one created by the Renouncers, believers in “Upload” (Furies 40), an unspecified state of total digitalization of the world. In the political and economic sphere, although the Protectorate is nominally headed by the United Nations, it is corporate interests that constitute a major force shaping the world while criminal organizations, such as Yakuza or Haiduci, compete for influence in business and politics with corporations and feudalstyle families. Despite, or rather in addition to, their successful generic mixtures, loom-
ing large over the world of Morgan’s novels is Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), which has come to “typify the cyberpunk movement” (Huntington 133) and whose author has been considered “original and gifted enough to make the whole movement seem original and gifted” (Csicsery-Ronay, “Cyberpunk” 185). Even if the assumption that cyberpunk’s definition is overwhelmingly determined by Neuromancer is too radical, this inspirational ur-text resonates in Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies: passages in Morgan echo-whether consciously or not does not detract from that resonance-passages from Neuromancer. Molly’s “functional elegance of a war plane’s fusilage” (Gibson 44) is translated in Sarah’s “assembly of low-frequency sine curves” (Carbon 3). The passage conflating the real-world and electronic image of BAMA (Gibson 43) is uncannily mirrored in the image of a city in Altered Carbon (119).1 Like Case, Kovacs is said to “fulfill the expectations like a machine” (Carbon 300). The implicit scorn at “hardcopy documentation” (Furies 56) reminds us of the diagnosis of Turkey as a backward country where writing still enjoys respect, while Case’s thoughts about “transmission of the old message” (Gibson 240) while he climaxes with Linda are reflected in Sylvie Oshima’s chanting of “a skein of machine code” (Furies 181) during her orgasm with Kovacs. Even a certain poetic quality of Gibson’s writing, so evident in Neuromancer, seems to permeate Morgan’s writing in passages like “the Smith & Wesson gleamed like fool’s gold on the scarred wood. Out in the Reach power lashed down from an orbital and lit the kitchen in tones of blue. I could hear the maelstrom calling” (Carbon 6). Whether all this justifies calling Morgan’s novels “cyberpunk,” “post-cyberpunk” or “cyberpunk-flavoured” (Butler,
Cyberpunk 57) is academic-regardless of monikers Morgan appears to engage defining elements of the convention.2 However, as part of that engagement, Morgan revises and challenges at least two major facets of Movement-era cyberpunk: the lack of any meaningful attitude towards politics and the issue of (dis)embodiment, each of which is further interrogated in a number of aspects.
