Kiln People
by David Brin

What would you do if you had the ability to produce copies of yourself that last for a day? David Brin poses that idea and comes up with an impressive array of ideas in the book, Kiln People.

In Kiln People, people have the ability to produce clay 'dittos', artificial people who share your mental 'standing wave'. These dittos can have varying mental and physical abilities (marked via skin colour) and share your thoughts at the moment of imprinting. After 24 hours, the dittos start to 'die' but before that happens, the memories of the ditto can be 'uploaded' back into yourself allowing you to know what has happened.

Brin's story focuses on Albert, a detective who spaws a whole range of dittos to help him do his detective work, mainly on crimes like copyright violations (dittos of famous personalities are stolen and bootleg copies made from them). However, events begin to take a sinister tone when he is asked to investigate the possible murder of the inventor of ditto-ing. The dittos he sends to investigate the murder (as well as others) goes missing and he may be forced to investigate in 'real-flesh'.

Events are told in the story from the 'multiple' viewpoints of Albert's various dittos as well as his real self ('realAlbert'). As they investigate and probe various events, they begin to uncover conspiracies and possible clues to events that may alter the course of ditto technology and humanity itself.

Brin does a pretty good job of speculating on what is possible if you could spawn multiple copies of yourself that last a day. From spawnning dittos that do extreme sports (very extreme sports) to transferring into augmented or modified dittos, he imagines it all. The society in Brin's story is also radically changed, with public webcams almost everywhere, making it easy to trace the movements of somebody; assuming you pay the right price to the owner of cams for the footage and have the right software to do the tracking.

Probably the most speculative part of the story is how people imprint dittos. He imagines that people have a 'soul wave' or pattern that can be transferred to clay-like structures in another body. This speculation will turn out to have major importance by the end of the story as Albert and his various dittos converge to the dramatic focus of the story.

Equal parts speculative fiction and detective story, Kiln People should keep you excited and engrossed to the last few pages.

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Kiln People by David Brin

Kiln People
by David Brin