“Oh sweet mother Gaia,” her voice swung quickly to realization. “Jameson! Will
you please phone up Clara Gonzalez, over on the Catalina Baby? Tell her that her goddam
boyfriend has misplaced another of his dittos … and he better come pick it up right now!”
I tried to smile and thank her, but scheduled expiration could no longer be delayed.
My pseudoligaments chose that very moment to dissolve, all at once. Time to fall apart.
I don’t remember anything after that, but I’m told that my head rolled to
a stop just short of the ice chest where champagne was chilling. Some dinner guest
was good enough to toss it inside, next to a very nice bottle of Dom Pérignon ’38.
Hello my beautiful watchers,
today I’m spotlighting another science fiction novel that got me into the genre.
Kiln People. Often mispronounced a killin people (which I assume is
intentional though the pun doesn't exactly make sense as this book isn’t particularly
killing orientated) is a 2002 science fiction novel by David Brin,
who in addition to being an author is also a scientist and Nasa consultant.
Other notable works of his include the uplift universe books and The Postman.
Yes, the one that was turned into the Kevin Cosner movie but that wasn’t his fault!
At its core, Kiln People is a Private Eye mystery novel but
with the huge twist that there are 4 main characters and they are all the same person.
You see, in the not too distant future human society has been
drastically altered by an unexpected revolutionary technological breakthrough,
the ability to cheaply create temporary copies of oneself out of a futuristic clay substance.
These copies are referred to by a bunch of different names, Golems,
Dittos, facsimile and there’s a bunch of shorthand words for real a person as well.
What happens is, a machine does a super intense scan of your body and mind, and
copies your brain waveform into the artificial brain of the golem,
with the intention of transferring your complete life experience and personality.
The result is (hopefully) a reasonably close copy of you, allowing you to do twice as much
work or any other task that you have to do in a day. At any time you can both plug
yourselves back into the machine and upload the ditto’s experiences back into your human brain.
The problem is they have very short lifespans they don’t have any way of generating anymore
energy than was initially imbued into them because they don’t have complex organs that can convert
food and you can’t just plug flesh, even sudo flesh into a wall socket and charge them up.
The result is they only last for about 24 hours before the enzymes in their bodies
start to break down, and they completely dissolve.
Even if this starts before they make it back to you, as long as you at least get the head back
in time you can still upload the memories, though a lot of people choose not to so
they don’t have to relive the experience of their body breaking down around them.
The complexity, and capabilities of the body you copy yourself into are varied
depending on the cost of the blanks you buy. The standard models are colour coded
to make them easy to tell which is which, and to make them easily differentiable from humans.
The cheapest models are green, which are the basic utility design. Limited thinking power,
smooth features, no additional abilities to speak of. This is
the ditto you make for manual labour and menial tasks like doing housework.
Then you have the greys, which are baseline reasonably close to being 1 for 1 human and
have more customisable features than greens. You can add night vision or
the ability to hold one's breath for hours.
Then there are the ebonies, jet black golems that have been designed to have perfect
mental focus and some enhanced intelligence. These are the guys you want to create when
you have a problem to solve or your job involves lots of data shifting.
And then there’s the alltime best sellers: ivory dittos, which are the pleasure models,
because of course one of the first questions that mankind asks about any new piece of technology is
“can I fuck it”? They also have uh….. enhancements.
Incidentally sex with dittos isn’t often considered real sex, more like using a sex
toy so getting someone to send you a copy of themselves to
bonk is considered more like a subscription to an onlyfans page than actual prostitution.
If you have the kind of mind that can handle it, you can use bodies
that aren't even remotely humanoid. You could be a t-rex shaped combat model or
a little weasel sized creature for reaching small places a human wouldn’t fit.
Very amusingly, the most coveted job in this world has become “bus driver” because “busses” are giant
monsters who carry people around cities and well who wouldn’t want to be a kaiju for a living.
Now obviously this had a MASSIVE effect on... Well everything. The work economy first and foremost.
A business owner might not have to hire any employees, he can simply make copies of himself to
do all the work himself, or if it's a specialist job you can always hire the best person in any
city as they’re always going to be available no matter how many jobs they have on the go.
Brin doesn't go into the complete history but he does reference a lot of upheaval and
a stressful transition period getting used to this new way of living.
Civil unrest and several wars that were very narrowly avoided.
The book takes place in that sweet spot where the world has ironed out a lot of the kinks, but
there's still a enough residual mentality from the before times that the characters feel relatable.
The world hasn’t been changed beyond recognition... Yet.
The result, predictably, is the vast majority of the world filing for unemployment benefits.
In the country of the stories setting it's referred to as the purple wage.
It's not all bad, it seems to allow for a comfortable if not extravagant existence so
the biggest issue that affects people day to day is boredom.
This is countered by people utilizing golems for increasingly weird and
fanitical hobbies. Obviously sex but also gladiatorial deathmatches, which
are considered to be a fun way to spend an evening.
Another notable drawback of living the ditto lifestyle is they’re considered to be objects,
not people. Despite them being fully sapient and able to feel
pain, killing one is considered a finable misdemeanor at worst.
When you go out into the world as a golem, you have to accept that all number of terrible
things might happen to you and that this will just not be considered to be a serious issue.
So as you can imagine, with a whole group of beings with different colour skin being
considered property, the real life slavery paralels are unmissable and not ignored,
but its not treated as an exact allegory.
You have to understand the mindset of people who use Golems and
of the Golems themselves. They both have memories of being both.
Everyone’s had experience being the ruling class and the underclass and unless they use a ton of
Golems everyday they’ve spent a lot more time as the ruling class so on the occasions that
they ARE dittos they naturally gravitate towards thinking of themselves as complex appliances.
Of course there’s inevitably going to be occasions where that super sucks. Say,
if you’ve been ditnapped and know no one’s going to bother trying to rescue you. Plus I
can't imagine it's nice knowing anything that's done to you is just going to be treated like
I don’t know they just cracked your creator’s phone screen.
This and the other things that make up the mentality of the dittos are a huge part of why I
found this book so interesting. A large part of the story is told from the perspective
of beings that know they are objects, and keenly aware that they are very very temporary.
I mean of course at the end of the day humans are temporary too but
most of us at least don’t know that we have an expiration date tomorrow.
Many golems try to avoid the existential dread that would understandably come with
this permanent imminent mortality by believing in “an afterlife” which is a misleading
term as it's slightly more practical than a theologic or spiritual hope.
They convince themselves that they’re just temporarily disconnected parts of
the original’s soul and if they can make it back to their human and upload their memories
they will be transferred back into him as well, living on as a single unit.
Alternatively it can actually have the opposite effect and make people
pretty unconcerned with personal safety. As I said blood sports made a big return.
An interesting socal dynamic occurs when the ditto of a powerful rich person meets the human form
of someone who might otherwise be considered beneath them. Technically as a human the latter
has superiority over the ditto, however he probably wouldn’t want to flex on the
golem too much in case his original gets offended when he uploads the memories.
Dittos can actually outlive their original if only by a day,
sometimes allowing people to make their own funeral arrangements.
So that's the world, as for the plot, as I mentioned at the start,
this is a story about a Private Investigator trying to solve a case.
Albert Morris. He considers himself a pretty lucky man because he’s one of the few people in the
world still with gainful employment and his brain is highly compatible with the copying process.
Some people get mixed results regarding how much of their
mind and personality can be passed into the golems, but Albert always
gets a perfect download into everything from a greenie to a high powered Ebony.
As is often the case in these sorts of detective stories the PI gets in way
over his head in some scary stuff. A conspiracy that could potentially
destroy the fragile balance the world has finally found after its paradigm shift.
Albert usually implants his similes with the compulsive need to subvocally narrate
their activities and thoughts, recording it onto a device located in their throats so
there's always a perfect record of every case they help him with, that can be recovered even
if they don’t make it back to him before they dissolve. Basically a black box but for a person.
The entire book is narrated in the first person, implying it’s an archive of these records.
At the start of the story Albert makes three dittos,
two greys and one green and the book is split between all four of them.
They each uncover different parts of the mystery, so the reader is the only one
who gets the full picture until right at the end, and you might think that would have the potential
to get annoying but I don’t think it does which is a testament to Brin’s ability as a writer.
It’s cleverly presented so information isn’t repeated enough times for it to get old and
none of the Alberts ever get too hung up on things that one of the others already know.
The ending, uh, I mean I won’t spoil it but it gets… a bit weird. Like,
I guarantee you won’t figure out where this shit is going before you get there.
As far as the writing itself goes I was constantly impressed by Brin’s ability
to conjure very clear mental images with his words. It's all extremely concise but
you still get such a feel for the world around the characters and their actions.
The book’s a little on the chonky side at 460 pages but
it's not egregious and I think it’s good enough to sustain engagement all the way through.
So yeah, awesome concept, fascinating world,
strong story. If you want something a little different this book might be a fun read.
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Thank you for joining me, my beautiful watchers,
if I could impose on you to do me the standard youtube related solids of liking, commenting,
sharing, subscribing if you’re new and enjoyed the content and all those good things that keeps
channels from being consumed by the dreaded algorithm I would be most grateful. Please
take care of yourselves out there in these troubled times and I will see you soon.