Tor, 2002
Editor: Beth MeachamISBN 0-765-34261-8
Read: June 2010 (at age 32)
First time read
What to Expect:
This is a standalone book. It starts as a gritty, fun detective novel, set in a near future, and it turns into something… else… most of the way through the book.
From the back cover:
In a perilous future, disposable duplicate bodies fulfill every citizen’s legal and illicit whim. Life as a 24-hour “ditto” is cheap, as Albert Morris knows. A brash investigator with a knack for trouble, he’s sent plenty of clay duplicates into deadly peril, then “inloaded” memories that were shot, crushed, drowned…all part of a day’s work.
But when Morris tackles a ring of crooks making bootleg copies of a famous actress, he trips into a secret so explosive it incites open warfare on the streets of Dittotown.
My Reactions (spoilers!):
Overall:
I enjoyed this book, overall, but with decided reservations. There were certain broad assumptions that bothered me all the way through the book, such as, for instance: how does the whole “dittoing” industry (a sort of clone-for-a-day mechanism) pay for itself? It also seemed odd that dittoes were treated as so much property, when they were, for all intents and purposes, people. I liked the characters. I thought the descriptions were good. I liked the slang. It was easy to understand from context, and wasn’t generally spelled out. The exposition was mostly done well – there were a few “well, as you know, blah blah blah” moments, but in general it was just shown. The premise was cool, but it didn’t seem like it was particularly reasonable. It did allow for a lot of discussion of personhood, identity, racism (colour-ism?), segregation, and various other weighty issues. Mostly, I thought those were handled well, given the assumptions.
Rating: 3
Characters:
Fair. I liked the characters. The main character was sympathetic, and he was surrounded by characters that it was reasonable that he would like. The villains were ok, but not too well rounded. The dittoes supposedly varied in cognitive ability based on their colour, but I didn’t see as much of variance as I would have liked. All the various incarnations of our hero sounded pretty much the same to me, and the biggest difference that I noticed (and got tired of hearing) was the carping about “but I’m just a green” to remind the reader which head we were in at the time.
Premise:
Good. The premise had a lot of the cool factor. Briefly, it was that pretty much everyone can copy themselves into temporary bodies (dittoes) and be at several places at once, using copies that emphasize different characteristics of the original for specific purposes. It’s a really neat idea. Unfortunately, I’d just listened to L. E. Modesitt Jr. talking about his pet peeves (see Note 1) in reading sci-fi. His favorite peeve was how new technologies don’t make economic sense. This stayed in my mind all through this book, and I really don’t see how everybody in North America and Europe would be able to have dittoes. The logistics of shipping out blanks – several hundred pounds of special clay every day to everybody just boggles my mind. Never mind that almost nobody works, and most people are living on the Purple Wage, a form of welfare. Where’s the money coming from? To borrow an expression, I decided to put on my suspenders of disbelief and just ignore it, but it did put a crimp in the experience for me.
Setting:
Good. Near future. There were several comments on how “our grandparents would…” and the references were pretty much to modern times. There was a nebulous thing called “deregulation” that wasn’t ever fully explained, but seemed to have made most wrongdoing into civil torts, where you just pay a fine and be done with it. Harming a real person, however, was still a major crime. War was pretty much a sporting event, where international disputes were settled with war games. Most of it I really liked. One nit to pick – toward the end of the book, mention was made of an armoury of clone-soldiers waiting in reserve, kind of like nukes used to be. I don’t think that missiles and such would be supplanted by a large force of ready-to-activate foot soldiers. I think you still need to be able to quickly project force, and infantry, especially temporary infantry, doesn’t seem to be the way to do it on an international scale.
Plot:
Ok. I really liked the plot for most of the book. But leading up to the climax of my detective story, someone went and got all metaphysical on me and changed the book into a philosophical exploration of humanity’s next evolutionary step. There were plenty of twists and turns, successes and failures leading to this part though, so it was mostly satisfying, I guess. To put it a little baldly, I wasn’t a big fan of the ending. It was satisfying enough, but it went places that I didn’t think it needed to go.
Readability:
Good. It was excellent for most of the book, but when the book changed into a metaphysical treatise about becoming gods, there was a whole lot of jargon thrown around. My eyes glazed, and I’m not sure that I got as much as I could have from that part of the book. I’m not sure that I care to get more, though.
What other people think:
Note 1: Writing Excuses. If you don’t listen to Writing Excuses by Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, and Howard Taylor, you probably should go give it a listen. It’s a fun podcast dealing with the technical and business sides of writing as a living. It’s also good for trying to understand what an author’s trying to do.
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