Looking Out To Sea

A few minutes ago I started thinking how to write this review, and about the ideas presented in the book. I swiftly went off on a strange tangent related to continuations and website interaction and their intimate relation with human memory and criminal responsibility. Yes, really! I’m not kidding around here. So this will be two separate reviews in one — the straight-up “what I thought of the book” review, and secondly my thoughts on the issues the book raises, which may include spoilers.

Part 1. In Which we Look at the Book in Question

The last Richard K Morgan book I read, Black Man, was technically good but rubbed me up the wrong way. It took the silly way and the stupid explanation where the obvious one would have got the author into less trouble. That is to say, call the protagonist a genetically-engineered super-soldier and I would have no complaints; but call him a genetically resurrected pre-agricultural super-soldier and then I know you’re taking the piss.

But anyway, Altered Carbon had none of the silliness of that book. There was some slight super-soldiering but most of it seemed to fit in with the environment and the technology at hand. Humanity has spread to stars, developed True AI and has the ability to capture consciousness on file. Human bodies can have their minds added and removed at will, and their consciousness can be transmitted between distant planets and slotted into a waiting body.

The central plot is a detective story — the protagonist is a ronin hired to solve a mystery for a wealthy benefactor. It’s a really interesting mystery, though to my mind the “real” solution is not as good as the red herring that also appears. It doesn’t feel much like a murder mystery because the reader has very little sense for the norms of the society it’s set in. With Agatha Christie there are certain conventions one can rely on — long lost illegitimate children, the butler, unrevealed gambling debts and so on. With Altered Carbon you just have to take a back seat and see where the story leads.

It’s still a damn good read and I stayed up late in to the night on several occasions.

(From this point on there may be spoilers, though I won’t mention any explicit plot points. But reading further will give you more clues to see through the plot than I had.)

Part 2. In Which we Digress into Web Design

Tab-based browsers have revealed an interesting flaw in web shopping systems. If you have an Amazon page open on two different tabs, and you “Add Altered Carbon to Basket” in one tab and “Add Nigella Express to Basket” in the other tab; and when you look in your basket you’ll find both books are there. Each tab is just a view of the same basket in the server. (Note: this would also happen with separate windows, but I think the way people use tabs is subtly different and highlights the issue.) Now this isn’t inherently a problem, except that the user tends to view the tab as a container for their shopping, rather than the server. So if they close one tab but not the other, many people expect to find only one item left in their basket — the one they added from the tab that remains open.

People want to navigate two different paths through the same website in different tabs. Ordinary websites can do this without issue, as they are completely stateless — they don’t have to know anything about who you are or where you’ve been for the page to appear. But if you try that with your online bank you might find that one or other tab rejects you. Indeed, many online banks reject the use of built-in Back buttons for the same reason. The server needs to know where you are at all times and logs you out if it receives conflicting reports.

Web frameworks like Seaside have been written to solve this problem, so that each new tab you open to the same page becomes its own new context — you can skip backwards and forwards through pages without affecting other examples of that page. The client (your web browser) has to provide information to explain not only which page you want, but which link you clicked when you wanted it. So from two identical clones of Page A, you can go A⇒B and A⇒C and the second one you click won’t mess things up.

It’s a bit like saved positions in computer games, except you normally can’t have several instances of the same game open at once, with some clones of others. Imagine how that would work in Minesweeper: you’re not sure if a mine exists in a particular spot so you “clone” the game and click the square in one window. If you die, you can close the window and pretend it never happened, even though you have learned something about the state of the underlying board which still affects the other window. And if you didn’t die, you can close the clone that you left behind because it’s now redundant.

Part 3. In Which we Talk about (Human) Memory

One of the interesting parts in the book is the use of technology to store a person’s mind. A person can be dropped into a new body or taken out of one and broadcast across the galaxy on a radio signal. So if there’s a copy of you on disk it’s as easy to put it in two bodies as it is to put it in one. (The bodies are called “sleeves” in the book, and the practise of having two bodies called “double-sleeving”. And, though it is illegal, it happens several times.)

As one of the characters mentions when talking to himself in another body — how long before these two same people start to noticeably differ? How long before they’re really two people with the same starting point? An interesting enough question, which could be as well applied to identical twins in the real world. But even more interesting was a character backing up his memory and then killing off his unsaved self after committing a crime. So the old self, who doesn’t know anything about the crime — is he a criminal? His mind was the mind of him before he committed the crime; and his body is a vat-grown clone from his DNA which also didn’t commit the crime. So can he — should he — be charged?

It’s a fascinating little quandary. It would be easy to say no, he should not be charged. But then it would be easy to “save game”, commit a crime and revert back to the uncriminal mind/body afterwards. A tricky loophole, no?

And to my mind it was just like the example with the web pages. If you get so far into your transaction but decide you don’t want to continue, all you have to do is close the tab (kill the body) and you can revert straight back to your original tab with full settings restored. It’s Real Life™ with the Saved Game Extension. And it seems to let you cheat at life as well as at Minesweeper.