First published in
Amazing Stories, November 1939.
This story asks one of
the most fundamental questions of SF – what is a real person? Given
you have two exactly identical versions of a thing or person, which
is the ‘real thing’? More importantly, does the issue of a real
thing make any sense in that context? It’s one of the great themes
of SF that takes the genre away from mere technological futurism or
social satire, and into the realm of philosophy.
This story’s a neat
take on a sci fi perennial, but it emphasises for me how SF is so
often just a re-statement of old ideas in a new context.
Will, Bill and Joan are
co-inventors of a duplication process that they’ve put to
work creating exact copies of great artworks ‘for distribution and
sale at quite reasonable prices’. I think Temple rather
misunderstands what fine art’s all about:
Families of only moderate means found it pleasing to have a Constable and Turner in the dining room and a Rodin statuette in the hall. And this widely flung ownership of objets d’art, which were to all intents and purposes the genuine articles, strengthened interest in art enormously.
There’s a huge
assumption about ‘genuine’ here that doesn’t seem to be
questioned in relation to artworks, but which forms the basis of the
story’s philosophical dilemma.
Anyway, the three chums finally get bored with the
turning out fake art:
‘Look here,’ went on Bill, ‘I don’t know what you two think but I’m fed up! We’ve become nothing but dull business people now. It isn;t our sort of life. Repetitions, repetition, repetition! I’m going going crazy! We’re research workers, not darned piece workers. For Heaven’s sake, let’s start out some new line.’
The new line Bill
proposes is the pursuit of duplicating a living being. Just at this
moment, though, Will announces that he and Joan are going to get
married. As the title of the story hints, there’s been a bit of an
unstated love trinagle between Will and Bill and Joan – both have
an eye for her, but she has yet to express a preference. When Will
announces their engagement, and Bill that he’s left it too late to
say anything and his poor heart breaks.
At this point, I think
we can all see which way the story’s going.
Temple pursues a
particular way through it, but manages to avoid making a final
judgement on which version of Joan is the real one thanks to the
vagaries of the plot. He does raise the central questions quite
eloquently, though and contrives events to shine a light on some of
the more intractable conundrums.
This is the earliest
example of this problem I’ve seen, although it has its roots in
gothic tales of the doppelgänger. Philip K Dick famously pursued it
over numerous stories and novels, and when I first encountered it –
in We Can Build You – it blew my mind! Greg Egan’s short
stories and novels have takes the ideas further – and similarly
blown my mind – and it’s a favourite theme of the cyberpunks and
later authors, with their AIs and uploaded minds and artificial
realities.
It’s been a big
feature of my own fiction over the years, too, in particular my story Looking out For Number One, which was published in Abyss & Apex Magazine in 2007
and my third-place-equal winning story Original Mike’s Coffee Shop.
Even when I’m banging on about my other favourite topic –
celebrity culture – the plots seem to boil down to some variation
of these (although in my mind they’re related ideas, a subject for
another day).
There’s another
underlying theme here, though, that I quite liked. Bill produces a
perfect copy of Joan and marries here (creepily, they all call this
version ‘Doll’) but rather deliciously the copy, like the
original, prefers Will. It’s obvious, of course: what else would
you expect? It does say something about Bill though, and perhaps the
reader (or this reader, at least) that this totally natural
consequence comes as a surprise.
Maybe it’s a little
prim by today’s standards – Will never seems to entertain some of
the naughtier ideas that crossed my mind when Doll’s emotions came
clear – and a rather over-wrought and melodramatic prose style by
today’s standard. I’m sure however, that when this old saw comes
around again, contemporary irony and cynicism will seem as old hat as
this story’s prim buttoned-up mood.
Themes: what is an individual? science as business, love’s young dream, tragedy,
lost technology.
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