Altered Carbon

In the world of Altered Carbon, human consciousness can be digitized, backed up, and repeatedly downloaded into new bodies. When a body ages or dies, it merely means switching to another body and living on—in theory, immortality has been achieved. But in reality, only the wealthiest can frequently back up and update their consciousness; immortality thus becomes a privilege monopolized by wealth and power, and technology has not eliminated class but has made it more rigidly entrenched. The protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, was once an elite agent of the Protectorate; after a failed rebellion, his consciousness was stored away for many years. On Earth, the ultra-rich Lawrence Bancroft, after being murdered, is "revived" from his last consciousness backup but cannot recall what happened around his death, so he transmits Kovacs's consciousness across interstellar space to Earth, loads it into a new body, and hires him to investigate the murder. Carrying his old combat instincts and a bellyful of cynicism, Kovacs enters a world wrapped in megacorporations, political-business alliances, and virtual pleasures. The more he investigates, the more tangled the clues become: the dead, the revived, stand-ins, and lies layer upon layer, and his own past keeps being dredged up. The novel stitches cyberpunk technological imagination together with Raymond Chandler-style hard-boiled detective narrative; the language is cold and sharp, the pace extremely fast, and amid gunfights, body-switching, and conspiracy it asks the same question: when consciousness can be copied and bodies can be replaced, what is left in a person that cannot be replaced? This is the first book of the Kovacs Trilogy and Richard Morgan's debut; it won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and was adapted into a TV series of the same name.