Altered Carbon
Centuries from now, human consciousness can be stored on a cortical stack and slotted into a new body, turning death into an inconvenience for anyone rich enough to afford a fresh sleeve. Takeshi Kovacs, a burned-out former Envoy, wakes in someone else's skin on Earth with a single job, find out who pumped a particle blast through Laurens Bancroft's previous head. What follows is a brutal noir investigation through Bay City's brothels, cathedrals, and corporate towers, where every suspect has more than one life to spend and every alley hides a different version of the truth. Richard K. Morgan's debut weaponizes hardboiled detective tradition with cyberpunk savagery, building a future that feels at once seductive, sleazy, and bleakly inevitable.
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What you might want to know about Altered Carbon
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A former soldier is downloaded into a stranger's body on Earth and hired to investigate the suspicious death of a man wealthy enough to keep backups of himself running. First in a trilogy.
Yes. Netflix produced a two-season Altered Carbon series running in 2018 and 2020. The show adapted the first novel and parts of the second. It was cancelled after season two without completing the trilogy.
Richard K. Morgan wrote three Takeshi Kovacs novels: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. Each is a standalone case set in the same far-future universe with the same protagonist.
Altered Carbon was written by Richard K. Morgan, published in 2002 by Random House Publishing Group.
Altered Carbon is 496 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Altered Carbon takes most readers 7 to 11 hours to finish.
Altered Carbon is a standalone novel by Richard K. Morgan, not part of a series.
Altered Carbon is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
