The Duplicated Man is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel written by James Blish

James Blish

James Benjamin Blish was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling, Jr.-Biography:...

 and Robert Lowndes and published first in 1953 by Columbia Publications, and a second time in 1959 by Airmont Publishing by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy and Company, Inc.. It was one of the first fictional works to tackle the idea of "cloning

Cloning

Cloning in biology is the process of producing similar populations of genetically identical individuals that occurs in nature when organisms such as bacteria, insects or plants reproduce asexually. Cloning in biotechnology refers to processes used to create copies of DNA fragments , cells , or...

".

Plot

At war with Venus for decades, the Earth's military authority stood its ground. Missiles kept raining down on Earth with unpredictable regularity. Nobody knew where the next missile would hit. But conventional wisdom dictated that every attack be met with a counter-attack.

However, a pacifist peace party sought to have a truce declared with Venus. And Paul Danton believed in peace. For that, he was regarded a subversive.

It was a peculiar stroke of luck that he found a human duplication machine. It was an old machine, and it didn't work reliably after the first five copies were made. But if he could just duplicate the right world leaders, essentially make extra copies of them, maybe he would have a chance bringing peace to Earth and Venus.

Adaptation

The title and the general concept of creating a duplicate person to carry out some task was used in an episode of the original "Outer Limits" television anthology series, in an otherwise unrelated story about a scientist who had secretly brought a dangerous alien being to Earth to study, and then illicitly created a duplicate of himself to track down and kill the creature after it escapes.