Book 2 - Kiln People
Jan. 6th, 2005 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
palmer_kunYou may notice a trend, in that I'm keeping track of my reading for the year in my journal, inspired in part by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scott_lynch and guipago.
I finished Kiln People by David Brin last night. Wild book. Amazing premise. Brin has always been one of my favorites, with the Uplift series, and especially Earth.
So, Kiln People. It's a detective thriller with a mad scientist who has a hare-brained scheme. Pretty straight-forward. It's the setting and details that wow you.
See, in the future, advances have been made in ceramics, allowing clay bodies to store energy that allows them to be self-motivated.
Alongside this, scientists have isolated the SOUL. It's a Standing Wave which every person has, completely unique. And it can be copied and imprinted into suitable materials over short distances.
The result is "dittos". A person can copy their soul into a clay simulacrum, which then has all the memories, skills, intelligence and knowledge of the original. The ditto (aka golem, copy, rox) can then go out and do things for the original person (archetype, archie, rig), essentially allowing you to be in 2 (or more!) places at once.
Dittos only have a lifespan of 24 hours though... then they break down and dissolve. The kicker is that a ditto can return home and "inload" it's day's worth of memories into the original, thus achieving continuity of it's existence, and not "dying".
Ditto blanks are pretty cheap, and the tech is widespread. Real flesh is now very precious, and nobody does anything remotely dangerous in person anymore. Nobody does work in person either, it's too tedious. They send a ditto (or several) off to work each day instead, and inload the results afterward (but not always. Manual labourers don't bother, and why would they?).
The effects on society are obviously vast, and the story takes them into account.
Our protagonist is Albert Morris, private detective. For the majority of the book, the perspective changes between his, and that of the 3 dittos he has sent out on routine tasks. It's fascinating to see the same character in 4 different places at once, and watch the whole story come together from all the different directions.
I'm not going to say much more about it here, but it's an amazing book, well worth a look. The author' note at the end mentions how difficult the book was to write (I bet1) but it also let him play around with little-used devices, like second person perspective.
Now to find book 3...
scott_lynch and guipago.I finished Kiln People by David Brin last night. Wild book. Amazing premise. Brin has always been one of my favorites, with the Uplift series, and especially Earth.
So, Kiln People. It's a detective thriller with a mad scientist who has a hare-brained scheme. Pretty straight-forward. It's the setting and details that wow you.
See, in the future, advances have been made in ceramics, allowing clay bodies to store energy that allows them to be self-motivated.
Alongside this, scientists have isolated the SOUL. It's a Standing Wave which every person has, completely unique. And it can be copied and imprinted into suitable materials over short distances.
The result is "dittos". A person can copy their soul into a clay simulacrum, which then has all the memories, skills, intelligence and knowledge of the original. The ditto (aka golem, copy, rox) can then go out and do things for the original person (archetype, archie, rig), essentially allowing you to be in 2 (or more!) places at once.
Dittos only have a lifespan of 24 hours though... then they break down and dissolve. The kicker is that a ditto can return home and "inload" it's day's worth of memories into the original, thus achieving continuity of it's existence, and not "dying".
Ditto blanks are pretty cheap, and the tech is widespread. Real flesh is now very precious, and nobody does anything remotely dangerous in person anymore. Nobody does work in person either, it's too tedious. They send a ditto (or several) off to work each day instead, and inload the results afterward (but not always. Manual labourers don't bother, and why would they?).
The effects on society are obviously vast, and the story takes them into account.
Our protagonist is Albert Morris, private detective. For the majority of the book, the perspective changes between his, and that of the 3 dittos he has sent out on routine tasks. It's fascinating to see the same character in 4 different places at once, and watch the whole story come together from all the different directions.
I'm not going to say much more about it here, but it's an amazing book, well worth a look. The author' note at the end mentions how difficult the book was to write (I bet1) but it also let him play around with little-used devices, like second person perspective.
Now to find book 3...
