The next in my line of eBook downloads, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is perhaps best described as a cyberpunk Space Opera. It is set in a near future, perhaps 500 years from now, in which humans have developed a technology of human mind replication. This technology is not cheap, but it enables people to back up their mind and memories (their stack) and install it in a new human being (their sleeve) when their current human dies. This provides a kind of immortality, and changes many aspects of ordinary human life, including:

  • punishment: prison is time spent “on stack” while the sleeve in which you committed the crime is rented out to others to use
  • insurance: every person’s goal is to get a resleeving policy, so that when they die they can be reborn based on their last backup, in a new sleeve
  • torture: if you really really want to torture someone, you upload their stack into a virtual system, and torture them there for as long as you want – they can’t die

The very rich can afford regular backups, perhaps as often as every 48 hours and done remotely, but for the vast majority of even the middling rich, the mind and memories are backed up only internally, in essentially a memory chip inside their head. This enables them to die for real if their head is destroyed or the stack is removed and lost.

The story centres around a criminal called Takeshi Kovacs who has retired from a specialist psychotic marine unit called the Envoys. He is dragged out of a long prison sentence (on stack) by a very rich and long-lived man (a methuselah, or “meth”), who was murdered two days earlier and wants his death investigated by an independent operator. Unfortunately all is not as it seems (of course) and after a slight mishap on the first day, Kovacs ends up to his neck in real and virtual shit. There are a lot of tricks based on the fundamental conceit of the altered carbon (at one point we briefly meet an assassin who uses a copy of himself for backup, because he can’t trust anyone else); but there is also a sensitive and intelligent investigation of the consequences of this backup process for human society. What does death and childhood mean when you can live forever? Does money become more significant or less when it has the power to buy you eternal life? How does one prosecute a war when the dead can come back to life? And how does one deal with criminals who have no fear of death?

Kovacs answers most of these questions using an advanced array of extremely dangerous weaponry, and the author produces some very poignant moments based around the experiences of ordinary mortals cast into these situations. He also writes very well, giving simultaneously an excellent story, believable characters and an interesting and unpretentious exploration of some of the philosophical consequences of the phenomenon at the centre of the novel. This is an excellent novel, well worth reading, and I will definitely be pursuing the series as he writes more!