A Borrowed Man
A Novel
Tor/Forge · Print & ebook · November 22, 2016
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- Who it’s for
- A future-facing crime mystery pairs cloned identity with a missing book and a family secret.
- Genres
- Sci-Fi Crime, Androids & AI Science Fiction, Dystopian
- Published
- Tor/Forge, November 22, 2016
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Start with this bookAbout this book
A Borrowed Man: a new science fiction novel from Gene Wolfe, the celebrated author of the Book of the New Sun series. It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones. E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person.
Continue reading
He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human. A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth. It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police. She borrows Smithe to help her find the book and to find out what the secret is. And then the plot gets complicated.
Borrowed Mysteries
A future-facing crime mystery pairs cloned identity with a missing book and a family secret.
Come here for
- A clone carrying a mystery writer’s recorded personality
- Crime and questions of who counts as human
Expect
- Science fiction shaped around a missing-book mystery
- A sustained narrative with a complicated trail
Where it sits
| Sci-Fi Crime | 90% |
|---|---|
| Androids & AI Science Fiction | 48% |
| Dystopian | 36% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Sci-Fi
- Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi
- Noir Fiction
- Authors
- Gene Wolfe
- Publisher
- Tor/Forge
- Published
- November 22, 2016
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- Sci-Fi