Altered Carbon
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Altered Carbon
| Full title | Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, Book 1) |
|---|---|
| Author | Richard K. Morgan |
| Published | 2002 |
| Pages | 496 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | A hard-boiled detective novel set where consciousness lives on a cortical stack and bodies are interchangeable hardware — a murdered rich man restores from backup and hires an ex-special-forces operative to find out who killed him — and a Philip K. Dick Award winner that works through what death, identity, punishment and wealth mean once a mind can be backed up. |
Where I heard about it
- The a16z infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, A tier in its “very good books” sci-fi section, first of the three Takeshi Kovacs volumes listed, which the team introduces as “what infra people might call software-defined humans.”
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.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.