I Read Books: Kil'n People

Albert Morris is a private detective in a future in which people can copy themselves. The copies only last 24 hours, are made of clay, and tend to be specialised – green for basic menial work, ebony for concentration, silver for high quality copies needed for a meeting and so on. You can download the experiences of the copy, though not everyone does (or can).

He’s on the trail of Beta who is involved in copyright theft (making illegal copies). But things are more complicated than they look, and he gets caught up into murder, politics, war crimes and even stranger events, so new they may not be technically against the law.

Brin creates an enjoyable story, exploring reactions and extremes that feel like real outgrowths of his wacky and bizarre world-building. There’s a tremendous amount of golem references for example, and he draws links between this new technology and the most ancient – clay tablets from Mesopotamia, terracotta warriors from China. His use of different viewpoints – all Al Morris in different bodies, often seeing the same events from wildly divergent angles – is very clever. And then he pushes it still further in the finale, suggesting a new stage of evolution for intelligence.

Read This: For a really imaginative future crime thriller that takes it’s bizarre but interesting set-up very seriously, and uses it not just in the writing but in the structure of the novel.
Don’t Read This: If all this golem stuff sounds nonsense.