Altered Carbon

In the 26th century mankind has spread through the galaxy, taking its religions and racial divisions out into the cold arena of space. While tensions exist and small dirty wars flare up every now and then, the UN Protectorate maintains an iron grasp on the new worlds, aided by its very own elite shock troops: the Envoy Corps.

Meanwhile, what religion cannot guarantee technology has already delivered; when your consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack and routinely downloaded into a new body, even death has become little more than an inconvenience. As long as you can afford a new body...

Ex-UN Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before; it was a hazard of the job, but his last death was particularly brutal. Needlecast across light years of space, re-sleeved into a body in San Francisco on Old Earth and thrown into the centre of a conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that has forgotten how to value life, he soon realises that the shell that blew a hole in his chest on Harlan's World was only the beginning of his problems.

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon is an SF novel of extraordinary vision and depth. This fast-moving, breathtakingly violent thriller carries a weighty cargo of ideas and speculative science with graceful ease.