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Re: OT: Clones

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Monday, August 18, 2008, 18:57
> On Sun, 2008-08-17 at 18:38 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>> How have other SF authors handled the theme?
The main classic in this area that comes to mind is Kate Wilhelm's _Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang_, a post-apocalyptic novel where the few remaining humans propagate themselves more by cloning than by normal reproduction. More than one of John Varley's Eight Worlds stories involve a legal system where cloning is illegal and therefore it's legal for anyone to kill a clone *or* its parent -- as long as that reduces the number of people with a given genetic pattern to one. (I forget how his society handled natural identical twins.) Greg Egan had a very disturbing story about producing deliberately brain-damaged clones as organ transplant fodder; http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra&pagetitle=The+Extra&section=fiction My introduction to the idea of cloning was a juvenile SF novel, _Clone Catcher_ by Alfred Slote; it involved a similar premise as Egan's "The Extra", clones produced as sources for transplanted organs, but they were mentally normal and willing and able to try escaping to avoid getting carved up for their organs, thus the job niche for the titular protagonist. Robert Reed's _Sister Alice_ involves a number of clone families as the aristocracy of a far-future Earth. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/