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Altered Carbon
A Science Fiction Novel by Richard K. Morgan
Book 1 of the Takeshi Kovacs Series
Subgenres & Tropes:
- Cyberpunk,
- Transhumanism,
- Dystopian
This book is for you if you're into...
- Cyberpunk worlds where bodies are disposable tech and minds are currency
- Socio-political sci-fi that digs into class and immortality
- Gritty future noir set in a post-collapse Bay City
From Little Stack
In Altered Carbon, we are shown a world where our entire existences have been boiled down to a hard drive (“stack”), and bodies are simply the “sheaths” that serve as the host for our consciousnesses. This separation between the mind and body is the ultimate demonstration of transhumanism as a concept. The mind is at the core of humanity, and thus the body becomes replaceable and disposable.
Atop the excellent sci-fi worldbuilding and compelling character, I really enjoyed the exploration of socio-political hierarchies—done by showing how the poor receive only old, damaged, or mismatched bodies, and the rich get the best bodies money can buy.
The shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.
In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve"), making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.
Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats "existence" as something that can be bought and sold.
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