Customer Reviews

Kiln People

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Kiln People is a page turner. I've brought this book because it was 80%of and the front page looked good. It was a good choice finaly. I'ts about clones of yourself being made of clay and having limited duration (about 24 hours). They are made for doing the tasks you don't want to do or don't have time to do. When de day is finished, they return to their original to download their memory. It's the only way for a clone to get (continuity of living). In this case, the hero is a detective who's clones disapears and don't comes back for download while doing missions for many rich peoples related between themselves. There's a plot involving the ingenior of the clay people and etc. I highly recommend this book to sci-fi fans.

I don't usually write reviews, but this book deserves some support.
I liked the entire concept, along with the twists and turns that came along with it.
Loved the ending.

Read it.

WEDNESDAY MORNING'S POINT OF VIEW

In a meeting with the boss, while my rig sits at home reading this book which is about ME! But thems the breaks, dittos don't complain, there's no time really, when you only live for one day.

This meeting is really getting on my nerves, i feel an bearable urge to go to the park. I think I WILL go to the park. Oops, i'm out in the park- oh! does this mean I am a frankie? Sigh!
Meanwhile my rig is still reading this book- which i really should get my hands on. But only if I can read the whole thing in one day. If only life extension for dittos was being developed... but there are ethical reasons for that.

Might as well go see some people. Oh dear, someone is trying to kill us. But I am only a dit.

Woah, this is getting really strange. All the rules don't apply. I'm confused, this really shouldn't happen to a dit. Am I a hero? Who's the hero? Who is God? Where is God?

Ah- should have stayed home and read this book instead!

I found "Kiln People" to a great example of both David Brin's best and worst qualities as a writer.

First, the best: Brin comes up with some of the most novel, intriguing, and well-developed ideas in SF. In "Kiln People", Brin describes a futuristic society based on "ditto" technology, which allows everyone to create short-lived clay clones of themselves. Brin's exploration of this concept is truly compelling, and for that alone I'm glad I read the book.

Now, the worst: Brin has shackled these ideas to a confusing plot that is at times frustratingly lightweight and at others is maddeningly incomprehensible. Like "Sundiver", the novel unfolds as a detective story, and one that's not particularly interesting. The story then meanders from one bizarre episode to the next, without seeming to head much of anywhere. Towards the end, it spirals nearly out of control, echoing the pretentious incoherence of the end of the New Uplift Trilogy. When I finished, I couldn't honestly tell you what happened or why, or whether I cared or not.

Despite those criticisms, "Kiln People" is worth a read to savor in Brin's exploration of the "ditto" concept. Just don't expect much from the story, and you won't be disappointed.

The basic premise is a technology is developed which allows humans to make copies of our mind/soul, and these clay copies are able to do most everything we'd normally do, thus freeing ourselves up for other actions. The clay copies are only good for a day, and their memories can be uploaded back into the original person. It's kind of an interesting idea.

The hero of the story is an investigator, and Brin gets to have fun with different points of view of the same character. Different clay copies have different experiences, but the same basic personality comes through. There are lots of events going on which tie in together at the end. The hero ends up working for some of the richest people on the planet.

One of the weak sides to the story is that so little changes in a hundred years. Given this type of technology it seems like there would be hundreds of ramifications.

David Brin has been one of my favorite authors. When he is good, he is very good. I find that even when he is not at his best, I still enjoy his stories. The scuttlebutt on the internet was this story wasn't very good. I finally got around to reading it, and I'm glad I did. It is a pleasant, fun story.

A great read. A very different, thought-provoking, action packed, suspenseful novel with a first rate hero. What would you do if you could send out copies of yourself, not just for mundane everyday chores, but for adventures as well? And then download all the memories as if you were actually there! I found myself completely engrossed with the adventures and misadventures of Albert Morris and his copies. A very creative extension to the cloning debate I think! I found that it was a little difficult at times to keep track of the main characters, but it was certainly well worth the extra effort. I really hated to see this one end! It's right up there with my other favorites Ender's Game by Card, The Truth Machine by Halperin, Inhuman Beings by Carroll, and Dayworld by Farmer. Very imaginative novel and I highly recommend it.

A clay fiber that can act like a muscle isn't possible
by today's science and probably not by tomorrow's either.
A clay that will form neural networks that can learn is even less scientific.
So instead of science we have the metaphysics of "souls"
as quantum mechanics. The characterization is beautiful
and the permutations of personalities is very well done.
The book is after all entertainment, but it is unlike most of Brin's work,
not really science fiction; more in the line of metaphysical speculation
about the nature of intelligent waveforms.

Kiln People is set several decades in the future. The key technological innovation presented in the book is "golemtech" -- it has become possible to imprint a person's "soul", into a clay model, a golem or ditto, which will then have all one's memories, and which can do errands for their "archetype". These models last only a day, after which they return to the archetype, and the memories can be inloaded if the archetype so chooses.

This has resulted in an economic revolution. Most of the grunt work is now done by low-quality dittos. Recreations include, predictably, unusual "entertainment" using special dittos optimized for heightened sensation; realistic dramas enacted with dittos; and dangerous sports in which the loss of a ditto is regretted only if it results in complete enough destruction that the memories cannot be inloaded. Wars are now fought as a form of "sport", with skilled soldiers sending fighting dittos to special ranges to resolve international disputes. These various tasks are done by dittos of different sorts, by law all different colors.</P>

All this background detail is very well done. Brin has done a nice job of pretty pure SFnal extrapolation -- taking a quasi-plausible and interesting bit of future tech, and trying to work out its effects on an entire society.

The story itself is basically a thriller. Albert Morris is a private detective. He ends up with several different "selves" investigating (in parallel, it turns out) the death of one of the inventors of golem technology. Suspects include the victim's partner; a crime lord called Beta who has had many past encounters with Albert; Gineen Wammaker, a purveyor of exotic dittos; and various fanatics: anti-golem agitators, and those who want dittos to have full civil rights. This story is for the most part pretty exciting, and confusing in a good way that eventually gets resolved. Albert's journeys, and those of his dittos allow exploration of much of this future society. The search for motives for the murder leads us to investigate some research, hence further extrapolation: what would be the effect of dittos that could last longer than a day? Of dittos that could be copied over long distances? Of the possibility of loading somebody else's memories into your head? All this is pretty interesting stuff.

Then, the book pretty much runs off the rails. Why? I think the answer is -- too much ambition. Brin begins to explore even more metaphysical issues -- "souls" independent of the body, in another dimension -- life after death -- that sort of thing. And in so doing he stretches his extrapolation to the point where my belief in it snapped completely. The "mad scientist" finale really just about lost me. I think the book would have been better if Brin had turned off his imagination at a certain point -- if he had been more conservative.

That said, though I think the silliness of some of the last 100 or so pages of the book is a severe flaw, it's still a pretty strong piece of SFnal extrapolation up that point, with some pretty decent action to the plotline. Overall, I recommend the book -- worth reading, just not a great book.

Cloning is one of the classic themes of science fiction, raising all kinds of philosophical interesting questions about consciousness, ethics, morality, and the nature of reality and the human soul. Brin has tackled this topic by entering the relatively unexplored crossover realm of mystery/scifi. There are certainly many examples of this (George Alec Effinger's Mared Audran series, Larry Niven's "Gil of ARM" short stories, which are collected in Flatlander, and perhaps most successfully, Jonathan Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music), however it's a field rich with unexplored possibilities.

Brin's tale takes place about two generations in the future, and the technology has spread around the world allowing people to make cheap clay "dittos" of themselves that last about a day before disintegrating. The precise science behind this "imprinting" technique, and the process of inloading the clone's memories, is thankfully glossed over, allowing the reader to dive into this rich world. We immediately meet San Francisco P.I. Albert Morris in the midst of taking on his archenemy, a "bootlegger" who kidnaps high-priced dittos (for example those of movie stars), and makes crude pirate versions to sell on the gray market. Taking on these "copyright violators" forms the bulk of Morris's business, but soon he and his "ditectives" (there's tons of punning and wordplay in the book), get caught up in the the disappearance of the scientist who fathered this cloning process.

This is the first hint that Brin is going to build the story into a disappointingly grand scale. The initial world-building is very entertaining, as Brin gradually unveils the consequences of this new technology. The value of "real" life is now sacrocent, and war has become highly ritualized, treated as a spectator sport. Notions of morality have totally disintegrated as any taboo can be indulged in by one's ditto and then the memory of that can be inloaded to oneself. No one really has to work, as dittos can be sent to the office while you sit home all day watching TV. It's not seamlessly thought out, especially in a political or economic sense, but there's all the framework there for a very enjoyable series, as Morris and his ditto sidekicks play detective in this superwired and webcammed world, with plenty of humor and wisecracking throughout.

Unfortunately, the scientist's disappearance spirals into a massively complicated and convoluted conspiracy. Throughout the last third of the book, I kept groaning as all the earlier storylines coalesced into a massively unbelievable mad scientist scenario. Then things get really, really out of hand, and the final fifty pages degenerate into an awful exploration of "soulistics", quantam mechanics, and consciousness. Despite the attempt to ratchet up the tension with a ticking clock device, the book grinds to an almost halt as tedious speechifying invades to "explain" everything. The problem is that since Brin skimped (thankfully) on the hard science of the whole cloning procedure at the beginning of the book, it's doesn't work to make the process such a central plot element at the end. So, this is another of those massive scifi works that starts very promisingly, but both runs out of steam and is the victim of an overambitious scale.

When I first started this book, I found it very interesting. The world that Brin creates where anyone can make copies of themselves to be in more than one place at a time, or to complete mundane everyday chores while the "real" person can sit back and relax, raises all kinds of interesting moral, ethical, philosophical, and logistical questions. However, once I got past the initial novelty of this way of life, and got more into the actual plot, I realized that the story set in this world does not live up to the world that it is set in. At first it seems like a pretty boring mystery, but quickly accelerates into a ridiculously complex conspiracy which gets less and less believable and less interting as it goes on. At times I actuall felt like Brin must have been making it up as he went along.

Also, another big problem I had with the book was the lack of an explanation as to exactly how the physical process of dittoing was accomplished. I would think that this deserved more explanation than it got simply because of its importance to the plot. For example, what are the golems actually made of? Of course they are made of clay, as is often refernced, but then what is the psuedoflesh that is talked about occaisionally? I thought that perhaps the clay golems may be covered with this psuedoflesh, but later realized that this could not be the case because of things that happened in the story. Also, if the golems are made of clay, what is the difference between normal golems, and Kaolin's "hyperquality" platinum golems? I find it hard to believe that the same process that works on clay would work better on platinum. And if this is not the case, then isn't the difference just the color? And if it is just the color, then why are Kaolin's better than anyone else's? Another thing is that it is very important at certain parts of the story that the golems are identical to their original, except in color, but the process of how that physically occurs is never explained. Wouldn't a large man need a larger blank than a small man? Logically, I would think so, but in the factory, it seems that all blanks are fairly standard. Also, if the blank is somehow shaped to match the original, then how is the information on how to shape it obtained by the copying machine? It seems that in the story, all that is needed is for the copier's head to be in the correct place, nothing is mentioned about reading any physical measurements of the body. Finally, if the golems actually do look like their originals, how come Albert was not able to recognize his own copy at one point? It seems that the copies are recognizable when it is convenient to the story, and unrecognizable when that is needed for the story.

I really liked the premise of this book, but there was just too much wrong with the story for me to enjoy it. Even if I could ignore all the problems, it ws still much too long and slow and more complicated than it had to be for the story that was told. It really dragged from somewhere in the middle all the way to the end. Maybe with some editing, even with the problems, this book wouldn't be so bad, but as it is, there is too much wrong with it. Read something else instead.