Books like Altered Carbon
What should you read after Richard K. Morgan’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Richard K. Morgan
- 2002
- Cyberpunk
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Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Altered Carbon
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchNeuromancer
William Gibson
The book Morgan is answering. A burnt-out operator gets his body fixed by people who own him, and the whole grammar of neon, implants and corporate immortality starts here.
- Grimy, lived-in future cities
- Bodies you can swap
- What identity survives the body
- Deliberately disorienting first fifty pages
Best for paceSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Cyberpunk that knows it's funny. A sword-fighting pizza courier chases a drug that crashes the human brain, and it never once slows down to admire itself.
- Relentless forward pace
- Grimy, lived-in future cities
- The immortal rich
- Satirical, not noir-serious
Best for what makes a personDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Philip K. Dick
A hired killer walks around a dying city trying to work out which of the people in front of him are people. Kovacs's identity questions, asked thirty years earlier and colder.
- What identity survives the body
- A noir detective plot
- Grimy, lived-in future cities
- Strange, drifting, almost dreamlike
Great matchThe Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson
Post-cyberpunk with the same interest in who owns the future: nanotech has made goods free, so power has moved into education, tribes and inherited privilege instead.
- The immortal rich
- Grimy, lived-in future cities
- What identity survives the body
- Almost no thriller propulsion
Worth a look — with a warningThe Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi
Biopunk Bangkok where calories are currency and an engineered woman is legally property. The same question about manufactured bodies, asked with far less comfort for the reader.
- What identity survives the body
- Grimy, lived-in future cities
- The immortal rich
- Repeated sexual violence, graphically
Best for the body horrorAltered States
Paddy Chayefsky
A scientist uses an isolation tank to push his own consciousness backwards through evolution, and his body follows. Resleeving's nightmare cousin, written as a screenwriter would.
- What identity survives the body
- Bodies you can swap
- Relentless forward pace
- 1970s lab thriller, not cyberpunk
Great matchPattern Recognition
William Gibson
Gibson turns the cyberpunk eye on the actual present: a woman allergic to branding is paid by a billionaire to find the maker of some anonymous footage.
- A noir detective plot
- The immortal rich
- Hard-boiled first-person voice
- Set in the near-present, no tech
Best for the easy rideReady Player One
Ernest Cline
The cheerful end of the same street: a ruined world, a virtual one that's better, and a corporation trying to buy it. Pure momentum, no moral hangover.
- Relentless forward pace
- Bodies you can swap
- The immortal rich
- Nostalgia trivia does heavy lifting
Best for post-human identityThe Quantum Thief
Hannu Rajaniemi
A thief broken out of a prison where minds are copied and tortured on schedule, in a solar system where memory itself is a currency. Kovacs, several centuries further on.
- Bodies you can swap
- What identity survives the body
- Relentless forward pace
- Throws you in with no glossary
Best for the vengeful protagonistThe Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester
Gully Foyle is a brutal, unstoppable man who remakes his own body to get revenge on the people who left him to die. Kovacs has this book in his bones.
- A soldier who can't stop fighting
- Relentless forward pace
- The immortal rich
- Retro-future furniture throughout
Best for the detective plotLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
A missing-persons case in the asteroid belt that opens onto something much worse, half of it narrated by a hat-wearing detective who is pure noir in a vacuum suit.
- A noir detective plot
- Grimy, lived-in future cities
- Relentless forward pace
- Space opera, not cyberpunk
Great matchThe Peripheral
William Gibson
People in one century pilot borrowed bodies in another, and witness a murder they shouldn't have. Sleeving, essentially, with the rich of the future using the past as a hobby.
- Bodies you can swap
- The immortal rich
- A noir detective plot
- Withholds explanation for ages
Best for the soldierHalo: The Fall of Reach
Eric Nylund
Children taken by the military, rebuilt into weapons, and asked what's left of them afterwards. Crude next to Morgan, but it hits the Envoy conditioning nerve squarely.
- A soldier who can't stop fighting
- Relentless forward pace
- Hard-boiled first-person voice
- Game tie-in prose, plainly written
What should you read after Altered Carbon?
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Neuromancer by William Gibson — the book Morgan is answering. A burnt-out operator gets his body fixed by people who own him, and the whole grammar of neon, implants and corporate immortality starts here.
If what stayed with you was relentless forward pace, read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson instead: cyberpunk that knows it's funny. A sword-fighting pizza courier chases a drug that crashes the human brain, and it never once slows down to admire itself. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick is the other strong option — a hired killer walks around a dying city trying to work out which of the people in front of him are people. Kovacs's identity questions, asked thirty years earlier and colder.
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