Altered Carbon Lore: Stacks, Sleeves, Meths and the Netflix Series

What it is#

Altered Carbon is hard-boiled detective fiction in a future where death is a bureaucratic inconvenience. Richard K. Morgan's debut novel follows Takeshi Kovacs, a former elite U.N. soldier turned private investigator, hired to look into a rich man's death. Two sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, followed.

Netflix released the first season of an adaptation on February 2, 2018. Dynamite Comics put out a graphic novel in 2019.

How stacks and sleeves work#

Most people carry a cortical stack in their spine that stores their consciousness. If the body dies, the stack can be stored, then downloaded into a new body, called a sleeve. In the novel, an energy weapon destroys the stack for good.

Sleeves do not get an upgrade. You go through the full aging process each time, so most people re-sleeve once or twice and then stop. Dual-sleeving, running one personality in two bodies, is banned by U.N. law.

Crime is punished by shelving your stack. The state sells your body to the highest bidder while you sit in storage, sometimes for decades.

Meths and Envoys#

Meths, named for Methuselah, are the people who have lived through several lifespans. Only the wealthy can afford a new body on demand, and the very rich keep updated backups of their minds in remote storage, so even a destroyed stack does not kill them.

Envoys are the U.N.'s elite soldiers, trained in re-sleeving, psychological modification and combat. In the novel they are so dangerous that they are generally barred from holding elected office on any world. Kovacs is one, which is why anyone who hires him should worry.

Roman Catholics refuse to be re-sleeved after death, so their killers know the victim cannot testify. That detail drives the book's political backdrop, a debate over U.N. Resolution 653.

Book versus series#

The series is set in 2384 in Bay City, the former San Francisco, with Joel Kinnaman as Kovacs in season 1. Season 2 jumps to the early 2410s, thirty years later, with Anthony Mackie wearing the new sleeve. The show leans into the Envoys as a defeated rebel group, with Kovacs as its last survivor.

Our read: the novel is a tighter mystery, and the series is the better-looking spectacle. If you want to know whether the stack idea holds up, read the book first. If you want to see Bay City, watch the show.

Fixer's notes: Altered Carbon at a Cyberpunk table#

Cyberpunk 2077 has the closest relative: the Relic chip in V's head holds a copy of Johnny Silverhand. It is a stored mind riding in a living head, not a body swap. If your players like the idea, read braindance next.

For Cyberpunk RED, treat sleeving as homebrew, keep it expensive, and ask who owns the sleeves. That question is the story. See cyberware 101 for what bodies cost.

For the rest of the genre, the cyberpunk books page has a reading order, and cyberpunk subgenres explains where a story like this one sits.