What if you could send a copy of yourself off to work every day while you stayed home and enjoyed yourself? Or make a copy to do the housework or mow the lawn or go to school and take your exams? Imagine if you never had to spend time doing all the boring yet necessary stuff that clutters up your life! Instead you just let your copy handle it and you can spend your precious time doing the things you really want not the things you have to do. That is the basis Kiln People.
The story revolves around Albert Morris who lives in a world where people make cheap, clay copies of themselves, called dittos or golems, to handle all the boring tasks of life while they sit back and play. Albert is a "ditective," a detective who specializes in tracking down criminals who copy other people's dittos, a copyright infringement. Albert is on the trail of Beta, a ditto bootlegger he has been trying to run down for some time. He has also been hired to investigate the murder of the inventor of the ditto process.
I started out really liking this story. The whole concept the ditto people is such a cool idea. The future society that Brin depicts is complicated and fascinating and very strange. The story swings between Albert and two of his copies who are helping him solve the case, which was fun to read. But then towards the end of the story, Brin gets too repetitive in retelling the story from the different view points. I didn't care for the trip into transcendence and really didn't care for the cavalier way Brin just dismisses life after death. (According to him, our souls when we die try to reach transcendence but fail.) Also I just didn't get the ending, which I found confusing and ambiguous.
Overall, I would say, despite the problems I had with the novel, it is worth reading because Brin's golems are such an appealing idea and because it is an engaging look at a future society.
Review by Steven Silver: https://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/kiln.html.
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