In 2002 Morgan's first novel
Altered Carbon was published, combining elements of
cyberpunk and
hardboiled detective fiction and featuring the
antihero Takeshi Kovacs. In 2003 the U.S. edition of Altered Carbon received the
Philip K. Dick Award and the film rights were sold for a reported figure of $1,000,000 to film producer
Joel Silver, enabling Morgan to become a full-time writer. The film rights were later acquired by
Laeta Kalogridis, but production was trapped in
development hell for a decade, eventually gaining release in 2018 as a
Netflix series. In 2003,
Broken Angels was published, the sequel to
Altered Carbon, again featuring Takeshi Kovacs and blending science fiction and war fiction in a similar way to his cross-genre début. The success of this book solidified his literary reputation.
Woken Furies, was released in the UK in March 2005 and in the U.S. in September 2005. In this novel, the Takeshi Kovacs character comes into his own as a hero, not merely a long-black-coat clad, boilerplate antihero. Morgan wrote two six-issue miniseries for
Marvel Comics under the
Marvel Knights imprint. His first story,
Black Widow: Homecoming published monthly in 2004 was followed by a second,
Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her published monthly in 2005; both are available in collected editions. The second miniseries ended on a cliffhanger, but a third miniseries was never released, with Morgan stating that the series was "an artefact of limited appeal". Morgan's work on the character introduced a new backstory for the character involving the
Red Room. He received a "Special Thanks" credit in the 2021
Black Widow film.
Black Man was released in May 2007 in the UK and in June 2007 in the United States (as
Thirteen or
Th1rte3n). Later UK editions were published with the
Thirteen title. According to the author, the book is about the constraints of physicality and the idea that people are locked into who they are. These are things he could not deal with in the Kovacs universe, because for Kovacs and people like him mortality is avoidable: they just skip into a new body. The novel won the 2008
Arthur C. Clarke Award. Morgan wrote a fantasy trilogy with a gay protagonist,
A Land Fit for Heroes, the first volume of which has the title
The Steel Remains and was published in August 2008 in the UK and on 20 January 2009 in the United States. The second volume, titled
The Cold Commands was published in 2011. The third book in the series is called
The Dark Defiles and was published on 17 August 2014. In 2008 Morgan worked with
Starbreeze as a writer for
Syndicate, the 2012 re-imagining of the
1992 video game. Additionally, Morgan worked with
Electronic Arts and
Crytek as lead writer for their 2011 video game,
Crysis 2. In 2015/16 Liber Primus Games released a
visual novel based on the
A Land Fit For Heroes trilogy. In October 2018 Morgan's science fiction novel,
Thin Air, was published in the UK by Gollancz. In an interview before the launch of
Thin Air, Morgan described a common feature of his works: A graphic novel titled
Altered Carbon: Download Blues, which continues to follow the character Takeshi Kovacs, was released in July 2019, and an animated feature entitled
Altered Carbon: Resleeved was released in 2020 on Netflix. In 2026, Morgan published ''No Man's Land'', a fantasy novel set in the aftermath of World War I. Morgan's books are generally set in a post-
extropianist dystopian world. Morgan described his "takeaway" of one of his books as: ==Bibliography==