Takeshi Kovacs Books in Order

The Takeshi Kovacs novels drop you into a future where human consciousness is stored on digital stacks and bodies are rented like property. Interstellar travel and practical immortality exist, but only for people and corporations rich enough to buy new flesh on demand. Takeshi Kovacs starts the series as a former Envoy, an elite soldier trained to wake up in a new body, assess a crisis and end it fast, no matter the cost.

In Altered Carbon he is pulled out of storage and dropped into a hired body on Earth, in the vertical sprawl once known as San Francisco. A billionaire "Meth" has apparently killed himself and wants Kovacs to prove it was actually murder. The case drags him through brothels, corrupt police departments, religious politics and the lived reality of a world where the poor die while the rich simply swap sleeves.

Broken Angels jumps forward in time and changes gear into a war story. Kovacs is now fighting as a mercenary on the planet Sanction IV, where a corporate sponsored army grinds down a rebel movement. What starts as a routine campaign turns into a treasure hunt for a buried Martian starship, with rival executives, resurrected soldiers and alien technology all jockeying for advantage.

In Woken Furies he finally goes home to Harlan's World, the ocean planet where he was born and where a failed revolution still casts a shadow. Kovacs is running a one man vendetta against a violent religious order when rumours surface that Quellcrist Falconer, the long dead revolutionary leader who shaped him, might somehow be back. At the same time a younger, illegally copied version of Kovacs is sent to hunt him, forcing him to confront his own past in the most literal way possible.

Outside the core trilogy, graphic novels like Altered Carbon: Download Blues and Altered Carbon: One Life, One Death spin off fresh cases for him, from black site prisons to galaxy spanning conspiracies. The setting also reached a wider audience through a television adaptation, which reimagines parts of the backstory but keeps the central idea of stacks, sleeves and an Envoy who cannot stop digging.

Across the series Morgan uses the hard boiled voice of Kovacs to ask blunt questions about power, wealth and identity. The books are full of gunfights, body swaps and high tech gadgets, but they always circle back to who gets truly disposable bodies and who gets to live forever in comfort.

If you like your science fiction fast, violent and suspicious of authority, this is the corner of his work to start with.