By Richard Morgan

Gollancz, out now

In the 25th Century, Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has woken from his latest death and finds himself no longer the man he used to be. Wearing a new body ‘sleeve’, he’s invited to solve a murder, but what will he find out about himself at the same time?

Re-released as a tie-in edition to support Netflix’s new 10-part adaptation, Richard Morgan’s 2001 cyberpunk noir thriller appropriately now sports a new ‘sleeve’ featuring Joel Kinnaman as Kovacs.

At 470 pages, it’s a satisfying read that allows the reader to better get their head around the various technology and body swapping that at times created confusion on screen. The first of a three-part series, followed by Broken Angels and Woken Furies, Altered Carbon is a satisfyingly self-contained novel that delivers on all the whodunnit mystery elements while transposing them to the dystopian future. While a lot of readers have devoured the novel before watching the show, this review is taking the opposite approach to offer an alternative.

Unlike the TV series, everything is seen through Kovacs’ eyes – it’s written in first-person narrative – meaning that were only finding out things the same time as him. The advantage of this is that we get to follow his thought processes and the pennies drop at the right pace, as opposed to the show which features activity with the other characters. Don’t come to the book expecting Ortega or Reileen to be anywhere near as developed as their screen counterparts – that’s just not the novel’s primary focus.

For those concerned about the show’s violence, it’s right here in the source material, a particularly gruesome virtual torture scene being even more distressing, and something that would not be appropriate for any streaming series. Because the story is first-person it does inevitably have a narrator style to it, which brings it closer to the Blade Runner gumshoe narration that was forced upon Ridley Scott’s first cut of the film, but in every other way this novel is less indebted to that 1982 movie than the show is.

Verdict: It’s easy to see why Richard Morgan’s novel was immediately snapped-up to be a movie, though its detailed plot is better served by the breathing space that a 10-hour running time can offer. Even if you’ve already binged the show on Netflix, there’s a load more detail to immerse yourself in, particularly the wider ethical and religious questions, so see this as the ideal companion rather than an instead of. 9/10

Nick Joy