Movie Adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s ‘Altered Carbon’ Getting Fast-Tracked. Gulp.

Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon  is one of my favorite books. Ever. The spiritual successor to Neuromancer  with a whole lot more fucking, it milked my cyberpunk glands with capable hands. I’ve known that it was getting a movie adaptation for a while now (Morgan actually sold the rights to the book for $1 million, which enabled him to become a full-time writer. Good for him, man) but now its getting fast-tracked.

io9:

Hollywood has a mixed history with cyberpunk, to say the least – so the news of a movie version of Richard K. Morgan’s ultra-noir  Altered Carbon  getting fast-tracked makes us a bit nervous. So much of what’s great about that book is the intense violence and weird sex work… and then there’s the long torture sequence, which would be hard to get right without looking like torture porn. We  love this book  about a world where people can download their personalities and memories into newly cloned (or rented) bodies, but could it work as a movie?

The movie version is being spearheaded by a new production company led by writers James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Amazing Spider-Man, Total Recall) and Laeta Kalogridis (Alexander, Shutter Island, theBionic Woman  reboot), plus  Black Swanproducer Brad Fischer. Kalogridis is going to co-write the screenplay with David Goodman.

Kalogridis is a longtime collaborator with James Cameron, having worked on  Avataras well as the in-development  Battle Angel Alita  movie, so maybe she can bring some Cameron-style grit to this picture? Kalogridis tells Variety:

Altered Carbon  is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there – a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.

With the correct mindset (as taught by friends here at OL to my irrational self), this is win-win. If it rules, bonus! If it doesn’t, it can’t really take away my writhing love for the source material.

Dollars to donuts I don’t have the correct mindset.