The Duplicated Man

The Duplicated Man is a science fiction novel which was one of the first fictional works that tackle the idea of cloning. It was co-written by James Blish and Robert Lowndes.[1] The Duplicated Man was first published in the August 1953 edition of Dynamic Science Fiction[2] and in book form, in 1959 by Avalon Books.[3]

First book edition (1959)
Cover art by Ed Emshwiller

Plot summary

At war with Venus for decades, the Earth's military authority stood its ground. Missiles kept raining down on Earth with unpredictable regularity. Nobody knew where the next missile would hit. But conventional wisdom dictated that every attack be met with a counter-attack.

However, a pacifist peace party sought to have a truce declared with Venus. Paul Danton, a member of a subversive political party, who believed in peace so be his answer to make peace was considered.

It was a peculiar stroke of luck that he found a human duplication machine. It was an old machine, and it didn't work reliably after the first five copies were made. But if he could just duplicate the right world leaders, essentially make extra copies of them, maybe he would have a chance bringing peace to Earth and Venus.

Reception

Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction rated The Duplicated Man three and a half stars out of five: "Deviousness of plotting and many thumbnail character sketches enliven the book".[4]

gollark: It's actually quaternionic.
gollark: To some extent I guess you could ship worse/nonexistent versions of some machinery and assemble it there, but a lot would be interdependent so I don't know how much. And you'd probably need somewhat better computers to run something to manage the resulting somewhat more complex system, which means more difficulty.
gollark: Probably at least 3 hard. Usefully extracting the many ores and such you want from things, and then processing them into usable materials probably involves a ton of different processes you have to ship on the space probe. Then you have to convert them into every different part you might need, meaning yet more machinery. And you have to do this with whatever possibly poor quality resources you find, automatically with no human to fix issues, accurately enough to reach whatever tolerances all the stuff needs, and have it stand up to damage on route.
gollark: 3.00005.
gollark: Without GregTech. I haven't used it recently, which is probably for the best.

See also

References
  1. Phipps, Keith (2010-07-01). The Duplicated Man (1953) AV Club, retrieved December 28, 2011
  2. Blish, James; & Lowndes, Robert A. W. (1953). The Duplicated Man (Columbia Publications). ISBN 7-89010-030-2 The Amazon, retrieved December 28, 2011
  3. ISFDB Bibliography: The Duplicated Man Retrieved 2015-11-17.
  4. Gale, Floyd C. (April 1960). "Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf". Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 142–146.


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