Never Be Bored
23 May 2019
To Whom Am I Speaking?
Altered Carbon television series. Sense8 television series, Every Day book by David Levithan and 2018 Michael Sucsy movie, Travelers television series.
What makes you, you? Is it your body? Your memories? Altered Carbon is a sci fi Netflix series that begins with the question: What if you could download your consciousness into a device called a stack?
Takeshi Kovacs wakes up from prison to find that his consciousness has been put into a new body, at the order of the insanely wealthy Laurens Bancroft, who wants him to solve his murder. Attempted murder, anyway, since of course once Bancroft's old body was killed, Bancroft simply reinstalled his stack into a new body.
I love a good mystery story, and Altered Carbon definitely is that, but I think it also does a really good job exploring this world and dealing with the implications of stack technology—a technology that lets you switch your consciousness between bodies. What does death mean when, as long as your stack is intact, you could just be put in another body? How important is your body if, with enough money, you could just buy a new one? What happens if you fall in love with someone, and then they change bodies?
How do you know who you're talking to?
In Altered Carbon, everyone knows about stack technology. Sense8 (currently streaming on Netflix) takes a bit of a different approach—in this television series, certain small groups of people have the ability to sense each other's thoughts and surroundings from anywhere across the globe, but this ability is not publicly known. These premises also deal with the importance of the mind and the unimportance of the body in interesting ways—in Altered Carbon a body is easy enough to switch, and in Sense8, the mental connection these groups of people share transcends physical space. If you liked the mystery and action of Altered Carbon, then you might like this series too.
In Every Day, our main character known as A wakes up in the body of someone new, ahem, every day. There's no explanation, it just is. If you liked the romantic subplots of Altered Carbon but were looking for something a bit less violent, definitely give Every Day a try. I liked both the book by David Levithan and the movie (currently streaming on Hulu), even though the movie did cut out some stuff from the book. I think even more than the other recs in the post, Every Day deals with the idea of a person's intrinsic self being separate from the body, since A has no body of their own, just ones they borrow for twenty-four hours at a time.
In Travelers, currently streaming on Netflix, people from the future beam their consciousnesses into the bodies of people in the present, taking over their lives, working together to prevent their terrible future from ever occurring. It's got the trying-to-fit-into-a-life-that-is-literally-not-yours of Every Day, the small-group-of-people-who-can-only-trust-each-other of Sense8, and the consciousness-transfer-via-technology of Altered Carbon. Check it out for some bingeable action.