Altered Carbon
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| Author | Richard K. Morgan |
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| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Series | Takeshi Kovacs |
| Genre | Science fiction novel, Mystery fiction |
| Publisher | Victor Gollancz Ltd |
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Publication date
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28 February 2002 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 416 pp (Hardback), 375 pp (Paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 48236269 |
| Followed by | Broken Angels |
Altered Carbon is a 2002 hardboiled cyberpunk science fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan. Set some five hundred years in the future in a universe in which the United Nations Protectorate oversees a number of extrasolar planets settled by human beings, it features Takeshi Kovacs as a former U.N. elite soldier and a native of Harlan's World, a planet settled by a Japanese keiretsu with Eastern European labour.
A ten-episode TV adaptation by Netflix was announced in 2016.
In the novel's somewhat dystopian world, human personalities can be stored digitally and downloaded into new bodies, called sleeves. Most people have cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their memories. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely. Catholics have arranged that they will not be resleeved as they believe that the soul goes to Heaven when they die, and so would not pass on to the new sleeve. This makes Catholics targets for murder, since killers know their victim will not be resleeved to testify. A UN resolution to alter this legal position forms one strand of the novel's plot, to allow the authorities to sleeve a deceased Catholic woman temporarily to testify in a murder trial.
While most people can afford to get resleeved at the end of their lives, they are unable to update their bodies and most go through the full ageing process each time which discourages most from resleeving more than once or twice. So while normal people can live indefinitely in theory, most choose not to. Only the wealthy are able to acquire replacement bodies on a continual basis. The long-lived are called Meths, a reference to the Biblical figure Methuselah. The very rich are also able to keep copies of their minds in remote storage, which they update regularly. This ensures that even if their stack is destroyed, they can be resleeved.
One such Meth—a man named Laurens Bancroft—has apparently committed suicide that resulted in destroying his stack. He is resleeved from a backup. Because his stack is on a 48-hour back-up schedule, he has no memories of his actions during the previous 48 hours. He believes his apparent suicide was actually a murder and hires Takeshi Kovacs to investigate his death.
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