Science Fiction – a term invented by Luxemburgish born Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s, by the way – is not only about aliens or space travel. The best fiction about science speculates about the impact of scientific advances on human society by asking: what if?
The Future: Altered Carbon – Netflix
What if we could digitize and download our mind – memories, experiences, psychology – onto a data support? And put that support into any body we chose to? Death would lose its meaning and humans would become practically immortal. Only the destruction of that data would result in a “true” death.
Takeshi Kovacs was an Envoy-Soldier, a mercenary, the cortical stack containing his mind put in a prison. 250 years later, he is brought back, “re-sleeved” into a body by “Meth” Laurens Bancroft. A 300-year-old billionaire, he wants Kovacs to find out who murdered him in exchange for Kovacs’s liberty.
Kovacs doesn’t want the job at first, yet changes his mind when he is attacked, believing that there might really be someone who tried to kill Bancroft.
“Altered Carbon”, based on a series of books by Richard K. Morgan, paints a bleak universe where humanity has conquered death and space, yet is still at war with each other, the rich still taking advantage of the poor. In true “noir” style, Takeshi Kovacs is an anti-hero, who, although cynical about the world he lives in, can’t help but try finding justice and honor.
“Altered Carbon” is available on Netflix.
