READING ROOM

Philip K. Dick Award — Best Novel

ALTERED CARBON

"Death is just a software problem."

SYNOPSIS

Bay City, 25th century. Takeshi Kovacs has been in storage for decades — his Stack held in a UN Protectorate facility, his consciousness suspended in digital darkness. Then a Meth named Laurens Bancroft buys his release. Bancroft is over three hundred years old, wealthy beyond comprehension, and recently dead. He was restored from backup, but the last forty-eight hours of his memory are gone — erased before the most recent Stack update. The official verdict is suicide. Bancroft refuses to accept it.

Kovacs wakes up in a sleeve he doesn't recognise, in a city he's never visited, assigned to solve a murder where the victim is the client. Bay City is a vertical megalopolis of neon and rain, stratified by wealth from the orbital mansions of the Meths above the clouds to the street-level districts below the smog line. It is a city built on the assumption that death is optional — and that assumption has consequences for everything: law, morality, identity, power.

The investigation takes Kovacs through every layer of the city — from the luxury of Bancroft's orbital mansion to the violence of Bay City's criminal underground. He encounters a police detective whose sleeve he now inhabits, a hotel AI with centuries of memories, and a cast of characters whose relationships to death, identity, and power are as complex as the city itself.

Altered Carbon is a noir detective novel in the tradition of Chandler and Hammett, transplanted into a future where the conventions of the genre — the body, the crime, the investigation — have been fundamentally destabilised by technology. What does it mean to solve a murder when the victim can be restored? What does it mean to be a detective when the body you're investigating in isn't yours?