Netflix's Altered Carbon IS Arriving 02/02/18 (And Looks Awesome)!

The next great television show based on a science fiction/fantasy books is going to be a reality soon! It was announced in January 2016 that Netflix had ordered a 10-episode season of 1-hour episodes based on Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. These books are set in the 24th century where humanity has expanded to about a dozen worlds and the most notable technological change is the development of human conscious transfer and storage. One consequence of this is effective immortality because once a body begins to fail, one can transfer one's consciousness into another body. In fact, for the super-rich there's no reason to wait until death to do this consciousness transfer from an , and so the bodies that store consciousness are known as "sleeves."

Netflix has now announced that the series is called Altered Carbon will be available on the streaming service starting February 2, 2018! In addition to announcing the release date, a number of teaser and trailer videos have been released and they look AMAZING!

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One quibble I have with what I have seen of the show (in the trailers) so far is that in the books Takeshi Kovacs (the primary protagonist) is described as being "of Japanese and Eastern-European descent" but in the Netflix television adaptation he is being played by an actor named Joel Kinnaman who looks pretty fair-skinned (he's a Swedish actor). Kinnaman is quite attractive, but the non-white hue of most of the characters in the books (as far as I remember) was definitely mentioned. I don't think this will become a huge talking point as the series starts getting more prominent public notice, but I do find it somewhat troubling. I believe they will explain it by referring to an original "sleeve" Takeshi had where he is played by a Korean-American actor.

There are other interesting tidbts about the show in this Entertainment Weekly article: the pilot was directed by Game of Thrones alum Miguel Sapochnik (S6E09: The Battle of the Bastards) and the budget is rumored to be the biggest ever for Season 1 of a show (and remember House of Cards had an estimated budget of $100m for its first two seasons, or approximately $4.5m per episode).

I can't wait see this show on February 2, 2018!

With Game of Thrones probably off the air until the end of 2018 at the earliest and Season 3 of The Expanse shot but no airdate released (but expected to be sometime in 2018) we are living in the golden age of television based on speculative fiction classic works (by George R.R. Martin and James S.A. Corey, respectively).