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Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)
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2014 Reads > AC: Previous sleeving

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Joseph | 2433 comments So I got to thinking ... What other examples have we seen of people moving their consciousnesses around to different bodies? This is by no means a complete list, but it's a trope that does go back quite a while.

(For the sake of discussion, I'm just thinking of SF examples, not fantasy.)

The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs -- this one, from 1927, involves surgically removing & transplanting brains.

The Whisperer in Darkness by H.P. Lovecraft -- more brain-removal, but this time they're put into canisters to which sensory apparatus can be connected.

"Chateau d'If" by Jack Vance -- this time it's not surgical; they erase your memories and download somebody else's, which gets back to the "who am I, really" discussion from the resleeving thread.

The Dune series, primarily beginning with Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert -- all of our ancestral memories are encoded in our DNA; some people can access them; in a few cases, the memories can take over the host.

Voyager in Night by C.J. Cherryh -- humans are grabbed by a passing alien spaceship, copied and then played back, sometimes in multiple iterations and sometimes interacting with the originals.

I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein -- one of his later and deeply flawed books; this one harkens back to Burroughs with a full-on brain transplant.

OK, what am I forgetting?


David Sven (gorro) | 1582 comments Some more recent ones

Johns Scalzi's Old Man's War
Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga and Void Trilogy
Alastair Reynolds House of Suns
Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice


Joseph | 2433 comments Oooh ... House of Suns -- good example, and excellent book!


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Jon | 12 comments Steven Brust and Skyler White's The Incrementalists -- I'm not sure if this is fantasy or science fiction (and it looks like neither is Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ).


Joe Informatico (joeinformatico) | 888 comments Robert J. Sawyer's Mindscan and
Walter Jon Williams' Implied Spaces.

Maybe Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? Characters in that novel can be brought back from death by having your backed-up memories installed in a new body, but I don't remember if anyone ever came back in anything other than a copy of their original body.


Joseph | 2433 comments Oh, and I forgot another really obvious one -- Cirque by Terry Carr, which sounds a bit like that Cory Doctorow book -- your memories are periodically recorded and loaded into a cloned body if something happens to your original body. Which it often does because it's a very risk-taking and decadent culture.

(Man, I haven't read that book in a long, long, long time ...)


Jeffrey (finiousfingers) | 30 comments Chalker's "Four Lords of the Diamond" series. A secret agent's consciousness is duplicated and placed in the bodies of 4 different convicts each sent to one of 4 prison planets to investigate a galactic conspiracy. At least one of those worlds also involved a lot of body swapping.


Michele | 1154 comments Does Frankenstein count? I don't remember if the monster's brain remembers anything from its first body.

Freaky Friday I mentioned in another thread.

What about time travel where someone possesses the body of a person in the past? In Household Gods by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove a woman gets put in the body of an ancestor of hers in ancient Rome and lives out a tear or so in that body. There is no mention of what happens to the ancestor's personality during that time, but it doesn't seem to be in the body with her.


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