A for Anything

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating premise, terrible execution
Review: Skipping over the 70 years immediately following the introduciton of the Gizmo was a bad idea, regardless of the book's other faults. Knight proposes that in a world where a single armed revolutionary could raise in army of clones in hours, an aristoracy will be able to keep populations of slaves that vastly outnumber them. Does this strike anyone else as stupid? Slavery can only exist when there is an extreme disparity in military, economic, or political power between the owners and the owned. Putting down a Gizmo-equipped rebellion would be all but impossible; so long as a single enemy with a rifle, bullet, and pair of Gizmos exists, the fight isn't over. Cornering a Gizmo-equipped economy, where anything can be produced in any quantity and the only things having any perceived 'value' are those which were hand-crafted, is absurd beyond the pale. And in such an environment, a government would be totally helpless to enforce unpopular laws, like ones making slaves.

Governments would disintigrate, true, he got that much right. But the end result will be that any Gizmo-equipped individual would be as materially wealthy as they wanted to be, entirely self-sufficient, and (this is the kicker) basically invincible. You can kill me, sure, but the backup I made this morning will just be pissed off at you. It'd be like the "armed society is a polite society" maxim taken to a twisted extreme, where everyone is powerful beyond all measure but simultaneously almost totally incapable of hurting one another.

Rating:
Summary: Particularly relevant for the present day
Review: This book explores the societal implications of free, pervasive, lossless duplication of matter. In short, author Knight proposes that human nature cannot handle such a technology in a responsible manner; instead the world plunges into anarchy, from which emerges a feudal society based around the slavery of expendible, replicated humans.

Today legislatures, corporations, and consumers alike are faced with the issue of free, pervasive, lossless duplication of intellectual property. The analogy is not perfect, but "A for Anything" provides a very useful viewpoint to help you make a decision about the issue. It's not half bad as a novel either.