Altered Carbon

Now a major Netflix series, dive into the wild future that is Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon.   Winner Philip K. Dick Award Best Novel 2003 It is several hundred years hence. The digital upload of our consciousness to new waiting bodies – ‘sleeves’ – has become commonplace; for those wealthy enough to be able to afford regularly updated sleeves, life is effectively a state of immortality. Laurens Bancroft is wealthier than most and he has a murder to solve - his own. Somewhere between the regular backups of his entire personality to an orbiting remote storage, someone has seen fit to stage his suicide, an attempted hack on his backup an effort to be rid of him for good. With no memory of what has happened, he needs someone good – very good – to track down his murderer before they strike again. Takeshi Kovacs is a disgraced ex-Envoy, a super-soldier of the future designed for the extraordinary rigours of faster-than-light travel. Trained to overcome the psychological traumas of rapid re-sleeving to distant download centres across the galaxy, Kovacs finds his troubled digital consciousness pulled out of storage and into Bancroft’s bargain: his life returned, his sentence quashed, if he solves the mystery of the mogul’s apparent murder. In what was Richard K. Morgan’s debut novel, Altered Carbon is a high-octane fusion of cyberpunk chic and hard-boiled noir as we follow Kovacs into an outlandish future vision dominated by the very edge of speculative technology. Perfectly fusing William Gibson and Mickey Spillane, conspiracy, mayhem and imaginative verve all combine to form one of the most exiting novels to emerge from British science fiction in decades. The Takeshi Kovacs novels continue with Broken Angels and Woken Furies. Aside from SF, Morgan has also delved into fantasy with his acclaimed A Land Fit for Heroes series (beginning with The Steel Remains). Morgan has also written for Marvel Comics and the video games Crysis 2 and Syndicate.