Roman Catholics do not allow their stacks to be re-sleeved after death, as they believe that the soul goes to Heaven when they die, and so would not pass on to the new sleeve.

This proposition reverses precedent and would allow authorities to temporarily re-sleeve a deceased Catholic woman to testify in a murder trial.

While most people can afford to get resleeved at the end of their lives, they are unable to update their bodies and must go through the full aging process each time, which discourages most from re-sleeving more than once or twice.

Their consciousness is preserved and stored virtually, sometimes for decades, while their body is sold to the highest bidder to be used for re-sleeving another person.

Numerous colony planets exist apart from Earth; many were previously inhabited by an extinct alien civilization referred to as the Elders.

On Earth, a Meth named Laurens Bancroft has died in mysterious circumstances in Bay City (formerly San Francisco).

Though police officer Kristin Ortega believes he committed suicide, Bancroft is convinced he was murdered.

Kovacs discovers that Bancroft has been involved with numerous prostitutes, including recent murder victim Elizabeth Elliot.

He learns he is wearing the sleeve of Elias Ryker, a corrupt police officer and Ortega's lover.

The Rawlings virus is designed to scramble cortical stacks and prevent re-sleeving, causing permanent death.

With Kawahara's help, he retrieves Irene Elliot from stack, and hires her to implant the Rawlings virus into a brothel.

After a Catholic prostitute was murdered at Head in the Clouds, her resurrection would have revealed Kawahara's illegal activity.

Describing the book, Kirkus Reviews said that "The body count is high, the gadgetry pure genius, the sex scenes deliriously overwrought, and the worn cynicism thoroughly distasteful: a welcome return to cyberpunk's badass roots.

[7] In the series Envoys are presented as having been trained, deployed and led by Quellcrist Falconer as part of a revolution (called "the Uprising") that she leads on Harlan's World (Kovacs' home planet).

In the book, the hotel in which Kovacs stays while investigating Bancroft's murder is themed after Jimi Hendrix.

Since the Hendrix estate does not approve of licensing his image for anything they consider violent, the show instead chose the figure of Edgar Allan Poe and named the hotel The Raven.

[8] On 8 November 2018, Netflix announced an animated companion film, Altered Carbon: Resleeved,[9][10] set in the same universe and exploring new elements of the story mythology.

The film was directed by Jo Nakajima at Anima; Yoshiyuki Okada designed the characters, Ren Kikuchi supervised the CG animation, and MONACA composed the music.

The Japanese cast includes Tatsuhisa Suzuki as Takeshi Kovacs, Rina Satou as Gina, Ayaka Asai as Holly Togram, Jouji Nakata as Ogai, Kenji Yamauchi as Hideki Tanaseda, Kanehira Yamamoto as Shinji, and Kōji Ishii as Genzo.