Book Review, Kil'n People - David Brin ***** "Al Morris is a private investigator. Actually, he's lots of private investigators." Al lives in a future where every home has a kiln in the kitchen, ready to bake copies of you to go out out and live life on your behalf. No one really enjoys going to the office, send a gray ditto instead, you have a construction job ? Send a green ditto, it should handle the manual stuff. Need some specialist research doing ? Bake an ebony. Each ditto lives for a day, at the end of which it collapses slowly into a pool of organic sludge, but before the ditto decomposes, you can upload it's memories of the day back into your own head. Nobody really works anymore, except Al, he likes the hands on approach from time to time, but he still uses dittos for the everyday stuff, and the dangerous stuff. Al is hunting for Beta, a master criminal who makes illegal dittos of famous people for nefarious purposes. After many close calls, Al believes he is closing in on him. At the same time he is hired to investigate the death of the head scientist of the global company that makes the ditto blanks. Al makes some ditto's, two grays to undertake some routine investigations, an ebony to stay home and do some paperwork, and a green to take care of the shopping and mow the lawn. There's another ditto in the house, Al's girlfriend is away, so she left him a pearl ditto in the fridge, just in case he gets lonely/horny. For the rest of the novel the action swaps back and forth between RealAl and his copies and Brin lets his imagination run riot with freaky ditto wars, even freakier ditto sex clubs, and a memorable scene involving a bomb and a dinosaurs arse. Later in the novel Brin uses the advent of clone replicating technology, dittos able to copy themselves, to examine the question of the soul, and where it resides. David Brin writes to a consistently high quality, The Practice Effect, The Uplift War, Earth, Glory Season, all have been intelligent and stimulating reads, he is also able to inject a little basic humour into his characters and that sets him apart from many sf writers. Kil'n People is a doorstep of a book, but at around 600 pages, still a good inch smaller than Earth. It is entertaining, but at at the same time uses the story to ask some salient questions about the meaning of life.