Altered Carbon

The concept for the book is rather involved. Peopleâs souls and memories can now be digitized and stored. Once stored, if something happens to you, the soul and memories can be put into a different body, which is now called a sleeve (and explains the title). Not everyone is in favor of eternal life in different bodies. The problem is that much like a computer back-up, the last few hours of data is lost since it has not been backed up as of yet. Thatâs the situation for Laurens Bancroft, whose death is labeled a suicide, but he thinks that someone deliberately killed him. He hires Kovacs who has been trained as a member of an elite military group and now works as a detective. The book is violent, since Kovacs was trained to take a beating, but the bookâs hook is worth the violence. Why It Made the List For starters Netflix announced that this will be a 10 episode series in 2016. It also won the Philip K. Dick Best Novel award when it was released. Read It If You Likecyberpunk, dystopian societies.