Altered Carbon Adaptation Moving Forward At Netflix

Here’s your daily “Netflix ordered a new show” news alert.

Fans of the classic cyberpunk sci-fi book Altered Carbon – and consumers of gritty, futuristic noir stories in general – may be pleased to hear the aforementioned novel is being adopted into a series for Netflix.

Richard K. Morgan’s original novel is set in the 25 century and is set in a world where the human mind has been digitised, with souls transferrable from one body to another.

Writer and producer Laeta Kalogridis, who co-wrote Avatar and Terminator Genisys, bought the rights to the book and its sequels several years back, after co-writing a movie script that didn’t get picked up. The English teacher-turned-author published his first book in 2002 called Altered Carbon, and I was hooked. Takeshi Kovacs, a former elite interstellar warrior known as an Envoy who has been imprisoned for 500 years, is downloaded into a future he’d tried to stop.

How do you solve a murder in a future with no death? So, yup, definitely sounds like something Netflix would do since they have so much money to blow.

Kalogridis previously penned the a screenplay for Altered Carbon to no avail.

Netflix has already enjoyed success in the sci-fi genre with other original series including Sense8, which has been renewed for a second season, and the aforementioned Black Mirror, a BBC-produced sic-fi series for which Netflix will be taking on duties to create new seasons. Goodman, however, won’t be involved in the new show.

“Altered Carbon is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there”, Kalogridis said at that time.