Re: Replicant EThics and the Free Market
Steve Edwards (SAlanEd@concentric.net)
Tue, 25 Feb 1997 01:09:01 -0600
At 02:49 PM 2/25/97 +1000, you wrote:
>At 02:40 PM 2/24/97 -0600, Ravn (I think) wrote:
>
>>There's a good sci-fi story waiting to get out, about the clone waiting to
>>get chopped-up, for the benefit of his old, wheezing, near-dead master.
>
>Unless I'm mistaken, that's `The Eyeflash Miracles' by Gene Wolfe (1976).
>Yawn. I've been grimly entertained by most media commentators (sorry Ravn)
>making such remarks, including the scientist in the original news report who
>told us he had this *great new sci fi idea* for cloning Jesus. When Peter
>Goldsworthy did this in HONK IF YOU ARE JESUS a few years, I thought it was
>an *example* of cloning. Sorry, team, it's all been done. Gilbert Gosseyn
>(Go-Sane) in van Vogt's Null-A novels was a clone with replacements lurking
>in the tank back in the 1940s. In 1973, Nancy Freedman cloned JFK in
>JOSHUA, SON OF NONE. Kate Wilhelm's WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG, the
>classic clone novel, came out in 1976 (winning the Hugo award for year's
>best sf novel) and canvassed most of the possibilities, as did Pam
>Sargeant's CLONED LIVES the same year. Varley is crawling with these plots,
>and Egan carries them further. Even a late-comer like Lois McMaster Bujold
>has done it. Her recent Miles Vorkosigan novel (the titles of these
>Ruritanian entertainments drift away) used a nasty world where rich
>dictators had bodies grown and exercised for later transplant. The kids
>were not decorticated (have you ever seen the kind of body that results from
>microcephaly?), but trained with a kind of ideology/religion that made them
>happily anticipate their merging with, for example, The Lady... My point?
>Not just justice to my fellow sf laborers in the fields, but a pointer to a
>vast ream of elaborate material where many of the worst and best scenarios
>have long since been amusingly explored.
>
>Damien Broderick
>
>
Also, the Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin, about cloned Hitlers raised post
war in Brazil. Mona Liza Overdrive by William Gibson had a fabulously
wealthy clan that cloned itself.
Steve Edwards
SAlanEd@concentric.net, SAlanEd@aol.com,
http://users.aol.com/salaned/cyberplace.html
"Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon,
if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our
breadwinning, lies the cropse of our seedfather..."