These bizarre stories from master storyteller Levi are full of shadowed meanings, conveying truths about our technological society and how our scientific appetites have outstripped our moral capacities. Thus in "Some Applications of the Mimer," a three-dimensional duplicating machine is used to make a copy of a tinkerer's wife. But the copy brings out jealousies in the first wife. Unhappiness ensues until a novel solution is found. In "For a Good Purpose" a telecommunications system develops an intelligence of its own. Levi takes the technological artifacts that we take for granted and transforms them so that we see both science and human psychology at work.

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