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    Kiln People
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    Kiln People
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    Kiln People
    Ebook684 pages10 hours

    Kiln People

    By David Brin

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In a perilous future where disposable duplicate bodies fulfill every legal and illicit whim of their decadent masters, life is cheap. No one knows that better than Albert Morris, a brash investigator with a knack for trouble, who has sent his own duplicates into deadly peril more times than he cares to remember.

    But when Morris takes on a ring of bootleggers making illegal copies of a famous actress, he stumbles upon a secret so explosive it has incited open warfare on the streets of Dittotown.

    Dr. Yosil Maharal, a brilliant researcher in artificial intelligence, has suddenly vanished, just as he is on the verge of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. Maharal's daughter, Ritu, believes he has been kidnapped-or worse. Aeneas Polom, a reclusive trillionaire who appears in public only through his high-priced platinum duplicates, offers Morris unlimited resources to locate Maharal before his awesome discovery falls into the wrong hands.

    To uncover the truth, Morris must enter a shadowy, nightmare world of ghosts and golems where nothing -and no one-is what they seem, memory itself is suspect, and the line between life and death may no longer exist.

    David Brin's Kiln People is a 2003 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 20, 2003
    ISBN9781429971300
    Unavailable
    Kiln People
    Author

    David Brin

    David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international-bestselling novels include Earth, Existence, Startide Rising, and The Postman, which was adapted into a film in 1998. Brin serves on several advisory boards, including NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, and speaks or consults on topics ranging from AI, SETI, privacy, and invention to national security. His nonfiction book about the information age, The Transparent Society, won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin’s latest nonfiction work is Polemical Judo. Visit him at www.davidbrin.com.

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    Reviews for Kiln People

    3.5/5

    462 ratings28 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Started out as an action/detective novel, but got very bogged down in Part 3--in fact, I just skimmed most of that. It became boring waiting for the dittoed aspects of the detective to all get together & do whatever they were going to do. Especially boring because the "mad scientist" character kept blathering on about his theory.Reading The Golem by Isaac Bashevis Singer will give you referrant background for this tale of clones made from clay.Not worth keeping this book. I picked up this book because I was curious how many ways he could indicate a photocopying process without using a brand name (the jacket blurb did use 'Xerox').
    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable, the story of a detective in a world where you can upload and download copies of yourself to and from short-lived golem-like duplicates, though with some flaws in the execution.
    • 4/5
      A non-stop thrilling ride into a scary future. As hard sci-fi goes, Brin can get caught up in details and/or background as a rule, but this book flows well.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully immersive world! I enjoyed the philosophical questions raised, some even in passing. The variety of colorful characters were interesting without overburdening the plot. The end went a bit further into than I felt necessary, bit overall a great read.
    • 4/5
      I have to admit David Brin wrote a damn fine book. Humorous, insightful, exciting and thought-provoking, it has an amazing description of what one might find beyond our corporeal homes - if our souls really do reach beyond to some other plane of existence.
    • 4/5
      Substance: Kiln people are clay bodies animated with copies of the original's brain; more than one can be active at a time. So, the hard-boiled PI has clay-mation clones doing his leg-work, and the plot gets complex from there.Style: Keeping all the lines of narrative under control was a challenge well-met. Characters are full-formed (including those that are just a "ditto") and the action is fast-paced, balancing the slower philosophical and personal narrative. And the mystery / suspense plot is well done.
    • 3/5
      Curiously readable, but not one of his best. An odd mixture of SF and Noir.
    • 5/5
      This is a brilliant read! Mystery, adventure, science fiction, and philosophy all rolled into one. Mr. Brin never lets his reader get lost in the story; it has a marvelous sense of place, excellent world building, and one of the best 1st person POV I have ever read. The second time I read it, I got even more out of it!
    • 4/5
      Makes you want to vote for/against (I keep vacillating) stem cell research; cloning and that whole thang!! But would love to see this movie made!!!!
    • 4/5
      This is a tough book to review.

      It's good. Quite good. But David Brin has written better.

      Kiln People is extremely clever, funny, original, and memorable. It presents a very original idea: a future society in which people can temporarily spin off copies of themselves in clay duplicates, "inloading" the memories from those golems at the end of the day. And in that setting, it incorporates a nicely-handled detective story, as well as more puns and obscure references than you can shake a stick at.

      At the same time, there's no denying that it's not first-rate Brin. For any other writer (except the greatest ones), I'd give this book a strong 4.2. But I expect more from Brin, so I'll give it a 3.8.

      It does tend to get a bit metaphysical and
    • 3/5
      Very baggy prose reminiscent of Piers Anthony. Detective plot necessarily a novelist's kludge, as it automatically allows for secrets, revealing, quests, and a final big reveal (that virtually never justifies the length of the quest).

      Conceit pays insufficient attention to corporeal character of cognition: how do sensory distinctions between clay and flesh create different subjects? Instead, primary distinction between Albert and his dittos is the degree of intelligence and skill alloted to each: the low-grade green is slightly stupider than the grays which are a great deal stupider than the black golem. As a result, the novel remains in a transhumanist, transcendent groove.



    • 4/5
      This book is high on my list of books to read again.

      How can I describe this book? It is science fiction, depicting a future world very different from our own yet clearly related to and growing from what we have in our "now". There's a lot of world to explore. It's a philosophical examination of what it is to be human and how our technology affects our humanity. And it's a solid whodunit.

      That's just the story.

      What fascinated me even more -- what I found most audacious and so most interesting -- is that it is a first person story told from 5 different points of view who are yet all the same person. That's quite a tall order and explaining further would be more of a spoiler than I'm willing to give, although I recall certain elements of it are used in blurbs and descriptions. That Brin could make these 5 different/same people sound distinct, yet use the nearly unavoidable tendency for a writer to always speak in his own voice to his advantage, is a spectacular performance. That it keeps place in support of the story is even better.

      I've heard rumors for some time that this book is the first of a series and the ending cries out loudly for continuation, but as yet I do not know if a second book exists or will come out. Kiln People is a big act to follow for a variety of reasons.
    • 5/5
      Oh, never mind. I'm always just a bit grumpy getting up off the warming tray, grabbing paper garments from a rack and slipping them over limbs that still glow with ignition enzymes, knowing I'm the copy-for-a-day.Of course I remember doing this thousands of times. Part of modern living, that's all. Still it feels like when my parents used to hand me a long list of chores, saying that today will be all work and no play . . . with the added touch that Albert Morris's golems have a high chance of getting snuffed while taking risks he'd never put his realbod through.Society has undergone a major change since the introduction of golem technology. Using a cheap home kiln, people have the ability to create clay 'clones' of themselves. The clones, known as dittos or roxes (Xeroxes?) are brightly coloured to distinguish them from rigs (originals) with the colour signifying their role; you can produce high quality blacks for research, executive greys as representatives, cheap greens to run errands, etc. There are limitations to the technology, as dittos only last for 24 hours before disintegrating, but the ditto's consciousness can have a certain continuity, since if they return home before the day is up the rig can upload their memories if s/he wants to. Due to the introduction of dittos, most jobs are done by dittos and most real people live a life of leisure or become perpetual students.The hero of this tale is one of the few people with a marketable skill who do have jobs. He is Albert Morris, a detective who can work on lots of cases at once by using dittos. When a woman employs him to find out who killed her father, who was a senior research scientist at Universal Kilns (the company who invented golem technology), realAlbert and various ditAlberts find themselves caught up in a deep-seated conspiracy.A very interesting concept and fascinating descriptions of ditto technology and the resulting society, but the plot did rather fizzle out at the end. Definitely the best 30p I've spent at the library book sale recently!I do that sometimes - underestimate the quarry. Nobody's perfect . . . and you can get lazy when such mistakes are never permalethal. It kind of makes you marvel at those detectives of olden times, who confronted and confounded remorseless evil while equipped with just one life. Now those guys really had it.This book is also known as Kiln People, but Kil'n People is a betteer title really, as that apostrophe changes the emphasis of the title to imply Killing People as well as Kiln People.
    • 3/5
      In this hard-boiled detective novel set in the future, Brin gleefully plays with the concepts of identity and immortality. In this future, we have figured out how clone short-lived, clay versions of ourselves, which can then go out and do the work while the originals enjoy lives of leisure. Since the copies are expendable, they are often assigned risky tasks or sent out to do chores or other drudgery. But since the copies possess all the memories and consciousness of the original, they are cursed with a knowledge of how brief their lives are, and their only fulfillment comes from making it back home to download their memories into the original, in that way achieving a kind of afterlife. Layered on top of all that is a mystery told from the points of view of a private investigator and several of his copies unraveling a complicated conspiracy case culminating in a plot by a mad scientist to achieve godhood, and this becomes a very complicated plot indeed. Good thing Brin tells it with a sense of fun and humor.
    • 5/5
      Welcome to the brave new world... where everyone can copy his/her 'soul' to short lived 'claymen'. One of the most well-thought future in the shape of a detective thriller but in the end turns out that it's far more than a simple crime story... in almost every aspect.
    • 5/5
      Does exactly what sci fi was designed to do, present us with a distorting mirror that shows us a true face. This is actually above a 5.
    • 4/5
      Kiln People is the book that finally allowed David Brin to exploit his least-known talent; humor so dark it's black. Not that the book is a comedy, but the delivery of its situations are enuf to border on the absurd at times.In the future, almost anyone can duplicate themselves into a cheap clay golem to send off and do their dirty work for them. As a private detective, Albert Morris goes thru more than his fair share. In Kiln People, he and his various temporary selves uncover a palimpsest of cover-ups occluding a basketful of conspiracies that culminate in a slightly goofy becoming-one-with-the-universe climax.What makes Kiln People unique is that its told from several different perspectives. But since all the POVs are first person, and they all come from Morris' duplicates, they're all technically the same perspective, just shifted in time and space. If you took
    • 4/5
      Good book-a very cool what if? scenario, relevant to the fast paced, high-stressed lifestyle we live today. With all of our modern conveniences including: easier, safer life style conveniences-washer, dryer, dish washer, cars, public/mass transit, electricity, plumbing, grocery store, fast food- theoretically we should have lots of free time-time NOT spent washing clothes by hand, growing and canning our own food, walking or taking a horse to and from work, etc. In reality, we work more and are under more work and lifestyle stress than our ancestors who were farmers and walked or rode horses into town. What does such a high stress society call for? Disposable versions of yourself, of course. What if, you really could be in more than one place at the same time? What if you could go to work, clean the house, run errands, do chores AND stay at home in bed resting all day-all on the same day?If you had Kiln People you could. Brin takes us to a future Los Angeles and to the life of Detective-for-hire Albert Morris. Albert begins his Tuesday with three "dits" or dittoes. Two Greys to do "quality" follow up on some of his detective assignments and one "low level" Green to do dishes, laundry, etc while he catches up on some much needed rest. So begins a week long adventure the likes of which he could never have imagined.This book is good on many levels. First, you have the sci fi what if society, next you have excellent characters-which are mostly versions of the main character-yet it works really well and finally you have a classic "whodunit" type detective novel. I liked the caste sytem for the dittoes myself-highest mental functioning-ebony, highest sensuality functioning-ivory, highest general intelligence-grey, most common worker drone-green. The book was fast paced and interesting until the end which kind of sucked. I still liked the book but wish the author had just gone ahead and ended the story and left the whole "soul enlightenment" stuff alone.
    • 4/5
      Based on an interesting concept - what if you could create limited duration 'clay' clones of yourself, every day if necessary, and send them off to do things, then absorb their memories at the end of the day? How would that change your life, and what happens when you and your copies get caught up in a giant conspiracy, some of them involving copies of you that you thought had long expired!A fascinating book, not Brin's best, but still good.
    • 3/5
      A friend lent me a paperback copy of Kiln People about a month ago. I put it off in favor of Tuchman, but started reading Kiln People last week. I didn't recognize the author's name until I stopped by the lender's desk to talk about the book.I heard from a source I'd rather not name here that David Brin liked to send lists to his editors/ publishers at the last minute before printing. The author wished to replace words with multisyllabic ones so his readers would have to look up a few. Considering that I was perhaps ten years old when I read Startide Rising, I tended to keep a dictionary handy anyway.Kiln People doesn't feel like it was tampered with in the same way. Yet the book is still quite complex. As of chapter nineteen, the story comes from seven or eight different viewpoints. All but one is from sci-fi golem copies of the main character imprinted with the main character's mind and experiences. The golems vary by color; expense; and, most notably; clarity of thought, memory, and sensory input. Essentially, the story is told from several different characters who are and are not the main character. It gives the sci-fi detective plot a few nice twists that would otherwise rely on several different characters.I know. I raised an eyebrow too, but I tend to like a story split into different viewpoints when done well. Margaret Atwood moves a character's viewpoint through time or by using other viewpoints with style and seeming ease, for example. Kiln People works in a way that is rougher around the edges than Atwood's The Blind Assassin or even Oryx and Crake, but Kiln People is easier to grasp in the beginning chapters because it unfolds from beginning to end along a timeline.Please keep in mind that I'm comparing Mr Brin to one of my favorite authors here. That his writing holds up at all is practically a glowing recommendation from me. Kiln People isn't hurt by several gems throughout the text, either."In olden times, the whole population of a factory--thousands of workers--would swing into motion at the blowing of a whistle, half of them heading home, tired from either or ten--or even twelve--hours work, while equal numbers shuffled in for their turn at the machines, transforming sweat and skill and irreplaceable human lifespan into the wealth of nations."The copyright date for Kiln People was 2002. That means the book may not be Mr Brin's latest. I certainly hope he either has or will continue to write about the world of ditective (golem slang from the book) Morris.
    • 3/5
      I'd give this book a weak recommendation. It's a good mystery based upon a great premise: the perfection of technology allowing humans to make disposable copies of themselves (called dittos) for tedious or dangerous work. Unfortunately, Brin was not able to stick to the mystery but wandered off into some mysticism that really detracted from the story.The mystery portion of the story is well done. There are a lot of subplots weaving back and forth and, while some are more obvious than others, there are enough twists that you'll probably be kept guessing right up to the end on some things. There's not as much tension as you might find in an "ordinary" mystery simply because threats to a ditto usually aren't that big a deal...the human will just make another. I must confess, however, that I did find myself rooting for green Albert to succeed; even though a ditto, he had the most interesting personality in the book. Real Albert also manages to get himself in trouble eventually and that ratchets up the suspense level a bit.** NB: Some minor spoilers in the next paragraph **I found the mysticism of the book less satisfying. By-and-large, the backdrop of this book is a technological science fiction story and the vague spiritualities just didn't fit into that framework. Brin has been guilty of this in some of his other works and I wish he'd stop—he doesn't do "humans evolving to a higher consciousness" very well. He tries to be grand but just comes across as a bit pretentious.Brin has done better if you're new to him. If you like his other stuff, give this a try.
    • 4/5
      I just finished reading this book - and I couldn't put it down. It has a fast pace, and it is not at all as dark as I suspected it to be, and it does make you think- if you could download yourself into any number of short lived "Clay" people and then upload the experience, How does that work ethically. Is each copy of "you" a separate entity? Does it deserve rights? What about the You copy that ends up cleaning the toilets?While the book is thick, it doesn't lag. Half way through, I wasn't sure if this was going to end up being a detective story set in the future, or a world changing sci-fi story. It kept me thinking. The one thing I would have liked to change is the ending - it seemed a bit rushed, and I would have liked to see more of a close on the ethics of the Ditto's (Copies).
    • 3/5
      excellent. very inventive. funny.
    • 4/5
      An interesting premise whereby "real" humans can duplicate themselves and have the shortlived copies perform menial tasks. Society is vastly different though strata are still clearly defined and power breads corruption as ever before..... a gripping read like all Brin's work.updated:Very enjoyable on re-reading too. There are some great references to contempary history that I missed the first time around. The Pentagon has become the Doedecahedron!The concept of what to do with your free time now that your ditto is available to do the hard day's chores is taken in interesting directions. And the difference in sanctions applied when "real" human flesh is at risk is equally well covered, along with all the requiste change sin laws that this new social life has required. Society evolves without much complaint, providing tomorrow is pretty much like today.Albert Morris is a private investigator, he (and his dittos) spend most of their days tracing ditknappings - where celebreties have their copies stolen and cheap reproductions made. He gets invited by the inventor of dittotech, to investigate the disappearance of one of his chief researchers. This investigation runs in many parallel lines. The prose splits inot realAlbert and the various dittos that are used, each with their own chapter. It can be a little confusing but is basically very well done.Thoroughly enjoyabel read, whodunnit, and thought provoking on the nature of society and human interaction.
    • 3/5
      An enjoyable story set in a "one-off" universe about clay cloned people. Seems like a transitional book for Brin, who doesn't seem to have really figured out his Next Act after the Uplift Series.
    • 3/5
      People have found a way of making disposable short term duplicates of themselves whose minds they can barring accidents reabsorb. It is carefully plotted with the author obviously enjoying the challenge of using multiple viewpoints for the same person. Things move along briskly for the most part and bad puns litter the plot. probably his lightest novel since The Practise Effect. I doubt it will have the influence some of his other books have had the uplift series Or The Postman for example but it is a thoroughly professional work by someone who is always worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Clever book where technology has advanced to the point of post-singularity. People can duplicate themselves and perform all of the menial tasks using their copies freeing themselves to do more interesting things. At the end of the day your ditto uploads itself into your brain and you’ve just led 2 (or more) lives for 1 day. These archetype dittos are made of clay and last one day. Albert, the protagonist becomes involved in a murder mystery and he and his multiple dittos become the focus of this book. The multiple viewpoints that David Brin weaves together makes it a fascinating journey
    • 4/5
      I don't read much sci-fi these days, but this one caught my eye. It has an interesting premise; in a future world, people can make short-lived clay copies of themselves to go to work and run errands etc while the real self enjoys life. The main character is a detective caught up in a murder mystery; unfortunately, the plot becomes extremely complicated and pretty difficult to follow. I haven't re-read it yet, but I'm hoping it will be a little more clear the second time around. The world Brin has created is interesting enough that I'm definitely willing to give it another try.