Altered Carbon

Richard Morgan’s first novel, Altered Carbon, is a science fiction noir that imagines a future where human consciousness can be stored in digital form in the body’s spinal columns. This effectively gives people immortality, as their “cortical stacks” can be removed at death and “resleeved” into a new body. Morgan’s exploration of the implications of such a state is only partly successful, and his prose is often stiff and awkward, but his book nonetheless has a dark and atmospheric cyberpunk setting.