Alien visitors offer anything in return for stories

Question

I'm trying to recall a science fiction novel. Aliens come to earth and start talking to everyone in the world but they only ask for "stories" or experiences and in return they will give the person what they ask for. One man asks for something special and receives a replicator.

Answer 1

This might be Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, his first novel, although it doesn't take place on Earth, but rather another planet sometime after most of Earth's population was instantly shifted throughout the galaxy after a godlike AI came to power on Earth. This particular society limited the technology level of their citizens to that of an Earth-like level, though, so you might remember it as having an Earth-like society.

The novel follows the ill-fated military campaign by a repressive state, the New Republic, to retaliate for a perceived invasion of one of its colony worlds. In actuality, the planet has been visited by the Festival, a technologically advanced alien or posthuman race that rewards its hosts for "entertaining" them by granting whatever the entertainer wishes, including the Festival's own technology. This causes extensive social, economic and political disruption to the colony, which was generally limited by the New Republic to technology equivalent to that found on Earth during the Industrial Revolution. Aboard the New Republic's flagship, an engineer and intelligence operative from Earth covertly attempt to prevent the use of a forbidden technology—and fall in love along the way.

Many people do indeed trade simple stories for objects that they desire, and, at one point, someone does wind up asking for a replicator device:

You trade?” Burya glanced up, a trifle disappointed; interstellar capitalist entrepreneurs were not what he had been hoping for.

“We give you anything. You give us something. Anything we don’t already know: art, mathematics, comedy, literature, biography, religion, genes, designs. What do you want to give us?”

“When you say you give us anything, what do you mean? Immortal youth? Freedom?” A faint note of sarcasm hovered on his words, but Festival showed no sign of noticing.

“Abstracts are difficult. Information exchange difficult, too—low bandwidth here, no access. But we can make any structures you want, drop them from orbit. You want new house? Horseless carriage that flies and swims as well? Clothing? We make.”

Timoshevski gaped. “You have a Cornucopia machine?” he demanded breathlessly. Burya bit his tongue; an interruption it might be, but a perfectly understandable one.

“Yes.”

“Will you give us one? Along with instructions for using it and a colony design library?” asked Burya, his pulse pounding.

“Maybe. What will you give us?”

“Mmm. How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production?”