Customer Reviews

The Duplicated Man

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If you can find it, this novel of future political intrigue from 1953 is worth a look. Rebels underground on the almost uninhabitable planet Venus bombard the earth daily with rockets carrying chemical explosives, but an apparently impenetrable shield which the original rebel leader somehow set up around Venus a century before prevents retaliation by the earth. There are so many characters that none really stand out, and the authors have clearly based the internal politics of the various open and undercover political action groups depicted on early-1950s Soviet models. For example one of the main characters deduces a policy shift in the underground group of which he is a member by noticing that the portraits of earlier leaders of the group have been slightly shifted in the order in which they are displayed.

The "duplicated man" plot element is actually a relatively minor part of the novel, and involves a totally ineffective effort by Earth's Security Council to impersonate one of the leaders of the Venusians by using a team of men who not only don't resemble him closely, but who know nothing whatsoever about him... not even his name, much less what his duties are or what his voice sounds like. As the novel ends there are a couple of big surprises for the reader, which I won't spoil here, but which an alert reader can see coming long before the revelations.

Political thrillers are fairly rare in early-1950s science fiction, and this example deserves more attention than it has so far received.

Paul Danton was a member of a subversive political party which had an answer: make peace with Venus. But the only way to peace was through the overthrow of Security. And Danton had found the one weapon which would make Security's fall possible: the long-forgotten duplication machine. It had been well forgotten, for a machine which could make up to five duplications of any living person was too dangerous to have around. but now, what if the top members of Security were kidnapped briefly, and then suddenly, there were five of each? No government could endure such chaos...