By the time Scottish geneticist Ian Wilmut announced the successful cloning of an adult sheep, the idea had already made its way into popular culture, most recently in the dinosaurs of author Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” and the comically split temperaments of the multiple Michael Keatons in last year’s movie “Multiplicity.” And before that, there were the Adolf Hitler clones produced by the mad Nazi scientist Josef Mengele in writer Ira Levin’s 1976 thriller, “The Boys From Brazil.”
But hardcore science fiction writers have been considering the implications for much longer–half a century at least.
The idea of cloning was first suggested in 1938 by German embryologist Hans Spemann, and science fiction writers quickly seized upon the key premise: What if there were a few more of me . . . or a few dozen . . . or a few thousand?
This idea drives A.E. Van Vogt’s 1945 classic, “The World of Null-A,” in which the villains keep knocking off the hero only to have him reappear to fight another day. He has learned to make doppelgangers of himself–clones, in effect–and he throws them into battle against the forces of evil much as a chess master sacrifices pawns, or as Keaton, a half-century later, was to throw his duplicate selves into domestic battles in “Multiplicity.”
And what if there were a few–or a few thousand–of you? Poul Anderson’s hero in “Virgin Planet” (1959) lands on a planet where spacewrecked and man-starved women have learned to duplicate themselves. After a long, solitary space voyage, this is a clone paradise, but while popular with the largely male science fiction audience of its day, the Anderson novel is not held, understandably, in high esteem by contemporary feminists.
Theodore Sturgeon’s 1962 novella, “When You Care, When You Love,” presents a subtler fantasy: A rich woman sets out to clone her dead lover from one of his own cancer cells. The outcome is a troubling fable on the unexpected consequences of best intentions.
A still more troubling note crept into the canon with “Rogue Moon” (1960), by Evanston writer Algis Budrys. An alien death trap has appeared on the moon, and the only way to explore it is to send out duplicates of a human thrill seeker, which die horribly, one after the other. The duplicates are manufactured by means of a “matter transmitter”–a sort of fax machine for human beings–and are telepathically connected to the original back on Earth. Alas, the weight of their multiple deaths gradually drives the original to madness and suicide.
The Budrys story proved to be a turning point, as “New Wave” science fiction of the late 1960s ushered in a more critical view of scientific achievements. Writing in 1969, New Waver Gardner Dozois had second thoughts about unvanquishable Van Vogtish legions of clone warriors. In “A Special Kind of Morning” (1971), Dozois describes the horrors of a future war in which the lowest ranking sentient clones–“mostly in the military and industrial castes”–are conveniently designed without stomachs or digestive systems.
Another science fiction concern was degradation of the copy. (Successive Xerox copies get fainter and fainter, right? So wouldn’t something like this happen with human beings?) Thus the premise of Kate Wilhelm’s “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang” (1976), about a post-catastrophe Earth in which a small group of survivors have reproduced the population by cloning themselves. Unfortunately, the clones seem to be missing some ineffable dimension of the human–and they don’t get along very well with their human progenitors.
Men, women and clones
By the 1970s–when scientists were cloning carrots and tadpoles–a cluster of gifted women writers arrived to invade what had been the largely male domain of science fiction. Instead of creating planets of man-starved women, these writers grasped a less obvious implication: With the technology of genetic manipulation, one of the two sexes was obsolete, and guess which?
Joanna Russ’ revolutionary Nebula Award-winning story “When It Changed” (1972) left little doubt which sex she considered redundant. A planet of all-female clones has it all–integration, efficiency, universal happiness–until the arrival of males spoils everything.
Alice Sheldon’s 1976 Hugo Award novella, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” turns Russ’ idea around. Sheldon, who felt it necessary in the male science fiction world to publish under the pen name James Tiptree Jr., imagined an Earth populated by 11,000 female genotypes, each with about 200 copies. Without men, they live in a harmonious, cooperative society with no wars, no violence, no leaders, no hierarchies. Women of shared genotypes call each other “sisters,” and they feel only pity for uncloned “singletons,” who cannot read the “book” of their type and learn to avoid their characteristic mistakes.
What about men in Sheldon/Tiptree’s future worlds? When contemporary astronauts emerge from a time warp, they are shocked to find that they are viewed not as saviors but as anachronistic carriers of violence and discord. They must, the women reveal sadly, be put out painlessly.
The initial premise–what if there were a few more of me?–has never lost its fascination, but science fiction writers have continued to give it new twists.
C.J. Cherryh’s “Cyteen”(1988) imagines a world in which predatory corporations compete to clone scientific talent, an idea that may have flickered past the minds of the folks at Microsoft and Intel–or their competitors. But for the wildest, scariest and funniest twists, it’s hard to top John Varley’s mind cube stories.
To the extreme
What if you could store spare copies of your body as well as spare versions of your memories up to a particular moment? Let’s say you’re murdered. The next thing you know, you wake up on a slab in a memory bank with your mother and your closest friends looking down on you. You see, they have loaded the most recent cube of your thoughts and memories into a perfect version of your body. The only thing is, you’re missing, let’s say, the last two or three months–however long it is since you last downloaded your thoughts into a memory cube. But there’s one consolation. If you catch your murderer, you can sue him for millions–up to his whole net worth–for your lost memories.
This is the premise of Varley’s “The Phantom of Kansas” (1978), and the prospect of suing the murderer is only the beginning of the ramifications. Want a sex change for a while? Just flip the X (or Y) chromosome. Lose an arm or a leg in an accident? A minor inconvenience that can be fixed in a matter of hours.
If you can afford it, you can spend a weekend in a lion’s body hunting on an African savannah, with the memories returning on Monday to your human body. But what (another Varley worry) if they misplace your original body? Of course there are strict regulations against unauthorized duplicates. And, hey, what are the rules on romantic relationships with opposite-sex versions of . . . yourself? Think about that one.
If the Varley clones strike you as far-fetched, consider how far-fetched the implications of Spemann’s clone idea must have seemed in 1938. Whatever develops, however non-obvious, science fiction will almost certainly have speculated about it.
Mind cubes? Hmmm. Don’t mention them to Wilmut.
James Park Sloan is a former science fiction columnist for Tribune Books, award-winning novelist (“War Games”) and biographer of Jerzy Kosinski. He teaches English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
