Altered Carbon

A hard-boiled detective novel in a setting where consciousness is stored on a cortical stack and bodies are interchangeable hardware: a very rich man is murdered, restores from backup, and hires an ex-special-forces operative to find out who did it and why he cannot remember. It won the Philip K. Dick Award. The premise is the point — once a mind has backup and restore semantics, death, identity, punishment and wealth all change meaning, and Morgan works through each in turn.

Context: On the a16z Infra Reading List under the Takeshi Kovacs series, which the team introduces as “what infra people might call software-defined humans” — bodies as hardware, consciousness as the software, transmissible and backed up. First of the three volumes listed.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Richard K. Morgan — the author.
• Broken Angels and Woken Furies — the second and third Kovacs novels on the list.
• Artificial Intelligence — the book treats minds as portable state, which is the substrate question under most AI argument.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.
• a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.