People! So useful and yet so ephemeral. Scarcely has one become accustomed to a person before they pursue other employment opportunities, die of old age, or perish because Cheryl from Human Resources forgot to feed them. Thanks, Cheryl! We make back-up copies of valuable files. Why can’t we do the same with people?
Science fiction authors labor under no such limitation. Consider these five explorations of the wonders that would surely result if only we could somehow copy people.
A for Anything by Damon Knight (1961)
The Gismo can duplicate anything, even other Gismos. Even, or perhaps especially, people. Overnight, the Gismo transforms the economy. Material scarcity is a thing of the past. The only true wealth is human labor. Surely, a worker’s paradise is just around the corner!
Not as such. By the mid-21st century, legions of duplicated slaves serve a tiny minority of Gismo-monopolizing superrich. Dick Jones is one of the lucky few at the top of this social pyramid… which is to say that his life will be one of relentless competition against his peers, unless of course the slaves take advantage of their numbers to rid themselves of their cruel masters.
I too am astonished that the relentlessly optimistic Damon Knight somehow got from “the end of material scarcity” to “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” before his short novel was an eighth of the way done.
The Eternity Brigade by Stephen Goldin (1980)
Determined to ensure a ready supply of combat veterans, the United States made an irresistible offer to Jerry Hawker and his fellow soldiers. In exchange for a handsome payout, Hawker and his colleagues would be placed in suspended animation, to be revived when the next war broke out. Hawker agreed.
That over the centuries Hawker would become progressively alienated from his employers and his role was a predictable outcome of the arrangement. More unexpected was the development of matter duplicators. Now stored as electronic data, soldiers could be recreated whenever and wherever they were needed. Even death cannot not free Hawker from an eternity of combat.
To quote Pratchett: “And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.” Duplicators make it possible to trade people like Hawker as if they were illicitly duplicated mp3 files. Which is bad.
Blueprint by Charlotte Kerner (1998)
(Translated by Elizabeth D. Crawford) Famed pianist Iris Sellin understood the implications when she was diagnosed with MS. MS might someday kill Iris; before that, it would rob Iris of her ability to play the piano. The prospect outraged Iris. In consequence, Iris embraced a bold effort to preserve her glorious talent.
Enter Iris’ daughter Siri. Siri is surprisingly similar to her mother. This is because Siri is Iris’ clone. All Iris need do is force Siri to replicate her clone-mother’s career and Iris will achieve a form of immortality. Children being notoriously cooperative when it comes to being shoehorned into a life not of their choosing, it’s hard to see how this plan could go wrong. Yet, somehow, it does.
You’d think if anyone could empathize with a clone, it would be their genetic donor. Iris’ mistake seems to be assuming that because Iris delights in being Iris, surely other people will as well. She would have done better to consider how different Siri’s context was from her own.
Glasshouse by Charles Stross (2006)
Robin/Reeve’s traumatic background makes them the ideal subject for unethical social experiments. Good news for Professor Yourdon, who needs hapless subjects. Robin/Reeve is recruited to play a role in a recreation and exploration of emergent social relationships in that long ago dark age known as the 20th century.
What at first appears to be an exaggerated version of mid-century American suburban social hierarchies proves even more alarming, as its architects have gone to great lengths to ensure conformity and deter escape. However, Robin/Reeve is not without allies… including, thanks to matter duplicators, judiciously edited copies of Robin/Reeve in disguise.
Many readers will come away from this novel with the impression that matter duplication, especially the sort that allows duplicates to be edited, is as prone to abuse as it is useful. However, others might come away with the notion that if you’re going to be unethical, best to go all-in from the start, rather than making any pretense of informed consent: Just whip up a few dozen subjects with no memory of any existence outside the experiment.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2013)
Like all galactic empires, the Radch was challenged by the sheer scale of the galaxy. A single centralized government would be plagued by communications delays. A decentralized system of satraps might fall apart into warring states. The obvious solution? Duplicate and distribute ruler Anaander Mianaai, to ensure uniformity of governance.
This seemingly perfect system is not without implementation flaws. Breq is a victim of those flaws. Breq is only a single person. Logic dictates that Breq abandon any hope of justice or compensation for the abuses heaped on her. Logic fails to fully comprehend Breq Mianaai’s determination.
Ancillary Justice stands out for me because it’s the only example of duplicated people I can think of where it’s a powerful person being run in parallel, rather than useful servants. I feel like I’ve forgotten some obvious examples, but standing in front of my bookshelves staring at spines has been of no help.
Of course, there are many works I could have mentioned but didn’t, from Triplicate Girl1 to Cyteen’s Ari. In many cases, this is because I have mentioned them in other contexts. Nevertheless, don’t let that stop you from recommending your favourites in comments below!
- The utility of a skilled but otherwise unremarkable person, like Triplicate Girl, who can become three skilled but otherwise unremarkable people may seem unclear in the context of the Legion of Superheroes, whose workplace routinely features kill-crazy AIs and personifications of the concept of entropy. However, there is at least one foe whom Triplicate Lass (later Duo Damsel) is ideally suited to face: Nemesis Kid, whose powers allow him to defeat any single enemy but are completely ineffective in the face of two or more foes. ↩︎
I recommend Peter F. Hamilton’s Great North Road. A science fiction murder mystery that features a business empire run by a family of clones, each generation of which becomes more genetically unstable.
cyteen
One of the critical technologies of Peter F. Hamilton’s entire Commonwealth Universe (Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained, The Abyss Beyond Dreams, etc.) is the ability to make back-ups of a person’s personality and experiences with the aid of a memory crystal, so that if anything untoward happens to their body, they are able to be downloaded into a fast-grown clone with only a few weeks of lost memory.
If only it had been mentioned in the article… oh wait.
David Brin’s Glory Season and his Kiln People feature duplicates (clones in one case, short-lived robots with the owner’s personality downloaded in the other).
Varley’s Nine Worlds series has a number of cloned duplicates- which is notable because it’s illegal in that setting for two copies to be alive at the same time. If having a clone is a crime only criminals will have clones.
Yes, Kiln People was what I was going to add until I saw this. I love the cute fillip of having some duplicates be defective and rogue… and one of them realizing it. “Oh, I’m crazy”
Arthur C Clarke had the MacKenzies in Imperial Earth, where the original had himself cloned when he couldn’t have children. Being a Clarke story it’s not a dystopia.
Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series has people having their consciousness transferred into modified supersoldier clones of themselves and, if they survive, into young clones of their old bodies. I don’t know if he ever explored that idea that this made functional immortality possible. The Colonial Union is dystopian.
My “favorite” (?) entry in this genre would be Spares, by Michael Marshall Ssmith, which answers the question: “What if you, a very well-to-do person, suddenly needed an absolutely perfect genetically matched kidney, and also cloning existed? Also, please do consider in any factor what you would feel like if you were the spare?”
(“favorite” is in quotes because it’s an excellent book and, like all MMS novels, gave me nightmares for a month after I read it.)
I think you can give up one kidney and maybe part of a liver, but what if then the original person has no need for the rest of you?
Parallel universes TV show “Sliders” regularly had one or more of other versions of the regular characters, but in one universe, they also had clones-for-transplant.
The Parallel Man, by RIchard Purtill. A wealthy but rather unethical behavioral scientist creates two clones of a pre-space ruler, Casimir of Thorn, and puts them into identical manufactured situations to test the hypothesis that the same person in identical situations will always behave the same way. It starts to fall apart pretty quickly, as it turns out that the hypothesis is wrong but the scientist refuses to abandon it. Eventually both Casimirs are freed from their labs, if at different times (one before being crowned king, the other after) and the two end up living rather different lives after that point, although they do eventually meet.
Someone else already mentioned Clarke’s Imperial Earth, which was my first thought, and Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, which was my second.
So, third, I remember reading a novel by Ben Bova whose title, The Multiple Man, I had to look up, as it was relatively forgettable. I do recall that it involved clones of the US president, and the one scene that has stuck with me all these years is the First Lady describing to the protagonist the threesomes (or even moresomes? I don’t recall) she would enjoy with these guys. What that says about my memory can be somewhat accounted for by noting that the novel was published when I was 14.
Not quite clones of the President; a set of clones are brought up to be President, on the grounds that no one person can manage the multiple tasks (public face, commander-in-chief, leader of the economy,…) the job requires. IIRC, it was Bova’s only attempt at a contemporary thriller, but no worse than his average.
I note that this is another instance of cloning power, contra our host’s unfindings; possibly it was unsuccessful enough not to have been findable for his library.
For serial rather than parallel the succession of Duncan Idaho gholas should qualify. Being able to awaken genetic memories does avoid some of the problems of clones not being the same as their originals, but has its own issues.
I’m also fond of the Eternal Emperor from the Sten books, who is initially presented as simply immortal before it becomes apparent it’s serial immortality, and where he’s put a system in place to deal with variability of successive copies–too bad no system is perfect.
F.M. Busby’s Rissa Kerguelen books has the ruling family of Australia reproducing themselves as a series of cloned daughters, though in that case there’s a clear recognition that they are their own individuals. Unfortunately, the cloning technology in use there gives us “Xerox of a Xerox” degradation as they go down through the generations since for some reason they don’t go back to using additional samples from the original. This is a problem since they’ve remained the ruling family of Australia rather than being absorbed into the world-spanning government of UET by virtue of having a bomb big enough to crack open the Earth.
I had been thinking of the Sten series, too. While the emperor is singular while ruling, don’t replacement emperor get raised/groomed/trained in parallel?
James Blish, The Duplicated Man (1959). Mostly about the characters, but duplicating world leaders is somebody’s desire. Duplicating isn’t that reliable either. Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
Not entirely certain how ‘regularity’ can also be ‘unpredictable’.
I didn’t write the blurb, and I agree that it’s a deliberately confusing phrasing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blish wrote it though; deliberate confusion seems on-brand for him.
I’ve got that one. The twist was that the duplicate would pick up attitudes from the person at the controls.
As I recall, the Queendom of Sol’s faxes could scan and duplicate (almost) anything, so it was practical for someone to have several instances running around. Versions could be merged, as well. In theory, nobody ever needed to die, which was kind of a bummer for young people in general and the crown prince in particular.
Schlock Mercneary gives us the F’sherl-Ganni wormgate, a technology which allows for the creation of illicit clones of the person passing through the gate to their destination. The F’sherl-Ganni, being entirely amoral, create clones of literally everyone who’s ever used one of their gates. The clones were interrogated and subsequently euthenised.
A wormgate mishap created the Gavs, an entire demographic composed of clones of one person.
There’s Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon in which the duplication serves much the same function as restarting a video game level, although since it was published in 1960 the comparison would not have occurred to anyone at the time.
In Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosiverse some of the Jackson’s Whole criminal organizations clone people for brain transplants and other unsavory practices.
In Phil Foglio’s Buck Godot graphic novel PSmith the title refers to a collective consciousness created by making an entire planet’s population a single genotype.
In James Islington’s Will of the Many the protagonist is copied into an other dimension. But at the end of the first book, it is quite unclear, what that means. Besides that it means, that he has to pay with his hand.
A more recent example is Edward Ashton’s Mickey7, which was just adapted by Bong Joon Ho as Mickey 17, similar to A is for Anything looks at how such a system could be abused by an ultracapitalist system, though in a more limited way.
Not a book, but the TV show Orphan Black is an excellent near future look at a secret cloning project gone awry.
Duplication is part of the plot in The Triune Man by Richard A. Lupoff, though it’s a bit off kilter. In this book, the protagonist has what is essentially multiple personality disorder (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder); the alien transport mechanism is to create a copy of him, and weirdly/conveniently enough, once there are as many copies as there were personalities, each personality sticks to one body and there’s no more switching.
A book with a similar-ish plot is my longtime favorite: Crompton Divided, by Robert Sheckley.
I guess this site doesn’t like comments with links anymore? I was just trying to link to the book on isfdb, but the comment wouldn’t post until I removed the link.
It also doesn’t seem to like quotations.
In several of the Eight Worlds yarns by John Varley, memories can be saved to tape and restored into a new (fast-grown clone) body. The main use of this is for to survive death (of course the reborn person only remembers up to the last backup), but in at least one story, “The Phantom of Kansas”,(without her knowledge or consent) the protagonist is repeatedly murdered
The World of Null-A seems like an obvious choice for this one. How does Gilbert Gosseyn keep reappearing when he’s been killed multiple times?
Thanks for this, James. There’s some great ones on the list and in the comments.
I want to also add Robert J Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment.
It’s always worth celebrating one of our fellow Canadians, and particularly this book, which is one of his best .
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.
Miles Vorkosgan was cloned without his knowledge to create his younger brother Mark, in Bujold’s “Brothers in Arms”
Although being limited to fairly realistic cloning technology, the effort to make an actual duplicate of Miles was foredoomed to failure
In The Babbler by Vernor Vinge , Hamid is the clone of a galactic hero. He seemed like a rough draft of Pham Nuwen to me..
A really old one here … _Joshua, son of none_ . by Nancy Freedman.. a recently assassinated US President is cloned. Then they have to raise the baby similarly to how the original was raised, hitting all the same major stressors and experiences so that the clone can grow up to be another politician worthy of replacing the original. and then at the end, guess what? the clone gets assassinated at the same age.
Ira Levin Boys From Brazil uses a similar concept around Hitler.
One of the stress experiences, if I recall, was a space shuttle accident that ended up as parallel to the patrol boat naval incident the original lived through.
And the doctor who took the tissue sample and made the original clone happened to be present when the clone is assassinated …
Derin Edala’s brilliant “COPY PASTE” (available online) is about a stranded colonist with no other resources but a matter duplicator.
There’s a short story I read in primary school, in an anthology that I’m pretty sure was by Nicholas Fisk, in which the narrator finds out that he’s been cloned. I think he was a bit disturbed by this revelation, and relieved to learn that the clone will auto-destruct when it’s served its purpose. Sadly for him, the story structure requires a further plot twist to wrap things up.
There’s Spares by Michael Marshall Smith, where rich people have themselves cloned, so that they have an easy source of replacement body parts. It’s a pretty popular plot though, in fact we could probably do a whole list of books/films that have the same idea.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler for radio serial Jefferson 37 that we’re looking at clones of rich customers, but it may be for a novel by some Japanese-sounding guy. But maybe there are hundreds of Japanese tellings of this idea, which reminds me… in Ben Bova’s Cyberbooks (1989?), a secondary or utterly peripheral plot is the publication of the next badly written but still profitable book by Sheldon Stoker. The relevance is that the last page is many years in the future and success continues for Sheldon Stoker Beta, a clone of the precious author of that name, possibly one of many but maybe that’s my anxiety.
The “official” “Evil Overlord” list doesn’t mention clones or doubles, as far as I see. Double-crossing, yes. A page of further EO tips on “TV Tropes” does have several mentions, including “I will not create an army of clones.”
I suspect that an Evil Overlord will avoid making copies, and TV Tropes touches on this, because a copy of you is liable to usurp you – after all, who would know. Only you would. However, in one “Doctor Who” story, the evil “Master” used ridiculous technology to convert the entire human race to “The Master Race” who were all copies of him. Including women. You don’t remember it happening because it wore off.
If clones are being made for spare parts, it should be possible to do it semi-ethically by destroying the tissue that would become the brain as soon as it’s surgically feasible. At any rate, in the majority of cases, those that don’t involve nervous-system tissue; if that’s what’s needed, the job becomes trickier. If nothing else, it would get around the problem of murdering a conscious person.
I’m fond of Richard Cowper’s Clone.
I think the human body depends on the brain to run things, including the heartbeat, though you could use a pacemaker maybe. But that might be too much trouble and extra cost. Or you could do lobotomy on the clone and leave enough of the brain intact for life. Incidentally, how old does an organ donor have to be to treat an adult patient? I think there have been child to child transplants?
Two instances of cloning for survival, rather than multiplication:
In Barnes’s “Thousand Cultures” series, citizens of many of the cultures back up their consciousnesses frequently, so they can be restored into a clone if their original body is irreparable/lost/….In L. Neil Smith’s The Rainbow Cadenza, a clone can be fast-grown and “cerebrally aborted” to make room for the brain of someone whose body is irretrievably damaged.wrt Knight being fast to turn a good idea south, one eighth of the book is slow; in Hell’s Pavement, we go from a mechanism to control child molesters to a mercantile-religious tyranny in less than an eleventh of the book (18 of 202 pages in the edition on my shelves).
That’s novel; the edit window shows bullet points, but they degrade into linefeeds when printed. Oh well,
Walter John Williams’ The Voice of the Whirlwind opens with the protagonist being awakened and learning that he’s a duplicate of a man who was murdered, but he didn’t update his memory recording for fifteen years, so the duplicate has to scramble to figure out what’s going on.
Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes has a similar premise, but on an STL colony ship, so the question of what went wrong is potentially really urgent.
Didn’t George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral series end with a story about twins being made anathema by their invention of the matter duplicator? Uniqueness mattered. I can’t recall whether there were actually any duplicated people, though.
And there was a story about a STL galactic empire facilitated by judges who made a long, looping circuit out from Earth. The judges were stored electronically on the ships and re-created anew at each planetfall. I can’t for the life of me remember the name!
Inquestor series by SP Somtow?
A few Chakat Universe stories have terrorists take advantage of how transporters work in the setting, (the mind and the body are recorded and transmitted in parallel), to either make duplicates to carry out suicide bombings or to create copies that have perfect disguises. This does run into a couple problems:
First, it’s hard to store the mind matrix for any length of time, and each read degrades the recording, (meaning that as you make copies they tend to go insane).
Second, when you change your body you do get all of the new body’s features. So if you become something that goes into heat, well, you’re going to do that at some point. It also means that becoming something with empathic abilities will result in you getting to feel emotions, (as a would-be terrorist found out in Humans First (And Chakat Second)).
The setting does see a more benign use of this: The Oceanwalker process is very effective at treating various body dysmorphias.
I will mention Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” without attempting to describe or explain it.