Altered Carbon

The protagonist of this book is Takeshi Kovacs, a former UN elite soldier turned private investigator. He’s old, or, to be precise, his mind has been around for decades, kept in ‘storage,’ a form of virtual prison. He is ‘decanted’ from storage and put into a body–a ‘sleeve,’ a temporary residence that he may get to keep if he does this one job: solving a seemingly unsolvable murder. 

Fifteen years ago, when I first read it, Altered Carbon showed me cyberpunk still had something to say. I wasn’t a writer then and hadn’t even considered being a writer, but I… show more.

I didn’t want to like cyberpunk (I have a few author friends who work in that genre), but I dipped an enhanced toe into Altered Carbon and was blown away. Immortality provided through cortical stacks and swapping bodies?

I was an immediate convert. I’m obsessed with over-population stories, and although I was a tiny bit disappointed that Morgan included colony planets, I found his universe compelling and disturbing, and I wanted in! Yes, I’d like the chance to live another life or two because it might allow me to do things differently; however, Morgan’s characters are stubbornly set in their… show more.

There are very few books that I read twenty years ago and still remember. This is one because the speculative concept is striking.

Takeshi Kovacs is a private investigator living in a future where people travel between worlds by swapping their minds into new bodies. Uniquely, he is hired to investigate the murder of a billionaire – by the murder victim himself. Yet again, it is a first-class crime story that also makes you think.