Sunday, January 23, 2005

Kil'n People, by David Brin

Brilliant!

A near-ish future detective story set in a world where people can make copies of themselves (dittos or dits) which they can then send off to do various tasks, only to download the memories back into the original at the end of the day.

Brin takes a truly weird idea for a technology, and then sets about looking at how it would change people and society - good ole fashioned speculative fiction - without getting all hung up on how the technology is supposed to work. His world had the off-kilter feel of something my Michael Marshall Smith, with a bit of the same humour, and the same edge and wryness we came to know and love from Brin in his Uplift books. The only faint blemish on this book - and it is faint - is also familiar from the end of the Uplifts; he seems to want his books to end in massive events of universe-shaking significance. In what otherwise felt like a detective story with a cool twist, the shift was a little abrupt (but only a little, and I loved it anyways.)

Definitely a keeper.

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