5 ideas
In "Some Applications of the Mimer," Gilberto, a compulsive tinkerer, uses the Mimer, a desktop duplicator sold by the American firm NATCA, to make an exact copy of his wife Emma. Gilberto's fix is to duplicate himself, so that each Emma gets her own husband.
In "The Versifier," a professional poet buys a poetry-writing machine from the salesman Simpson to cope with his backlog of commissioned verse. He gradually hands the machine all his output, and it adapts to any meter, occasion or mood. The ending reveals that the story itself was composed by the Versifier, so the reader has been consuming the machine's work all along.
Levi narrates impossible inventions in the flat, procedural voice of a chemist's lab report, with specifications, operating instructions, raw materials and cost. That gap between the neutral technical description and its monstrous implication is where the ethical critique happens.
Once a person can be copied exactly, questions of love, fidelity and identity collapse into questions of ownership, registration and legal title. The copy has no inferior status to appeal to, so the moral order that relied on each person being unique has nothing to stand on. Duplication does not just multiply goods; it destroys the scarcity that made certain relationships meaningful.
In these fables, dangerous technology arrives not as state secret or mad-scientist project but as a consumer product demonstrated by a cheerful commercial agent. The buyer's curiosity and convenience, not malice, drive the misuse, and the manufacturer bears no visible responsibility for applications it never imagined. Ethical harm enters through the ordinary logic of purchase, trial and tinkering.