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. ( )

interesting concept, boring delivery ( )

This is a detective/sci-fi novel that's funny, doesn't take itself too seriously, but still raises a bunch of interesting questions through its sci-fi premise of "What would the world look like if we could all make temporary copies of ourselves to do our work". The writing is a bit like Richard Morgan's in Altered Carbon, but the general tone is a lot more laid back. ( )

This is one of Brin's best. Brilliant, fascinating and entertaining at the same time. ( )

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. ( )