Cloning Blues: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'': ''The Finders Stone Trilogy'' by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb subverts that trope twice. When main heroine, Alias, {{spoiler|who is herself an artificial, magically created being,}} found out that she has many clones, she is originally angry at being "copied"; the actual clones are much calmer, have their own lives, and don't mope about their origin in the slightest. Even more—the clones would like to be friends with Alias, are unaware of her, or don't care even if they do know. Two clones are seen in the series, a couple more are mentioned, and all of them are confident women with different personalities. Eventually, Alias accepts her "sister" as an equal and seems to be at ease with the whole deal.

** In Alias's defense regarding her views of her "sisters" she'd just learned that she was not, as she thought, a naturally born person (hence feeling like a "thing to be copied"), and had been given the impression that her sisters hadn't existed past the destruction of the last of the five entities involved in her own creation so when one of them popped up in front of her Alias had a bad moment - since said last entity had specifically labeled the others as being more puppets to his whim than free spirits like Alias. As for her sisters being calmer, non-mopy, etc: most of them don't seem to have the first clue about where they really come from. Of the three that have actual screen time in the books, only one knew the full story. The other two both thought themselves simply amnesiac, much like Alias herself when first introduced.

* In ''[[Accelerando]]'' and ''Glasshouse'' by [[Charles Stross]], duplication of individuals is relatively common. Replicator-type devices are used, which results in perfect duplicates. Different "instances" of a person can be recombined in a process referred to as "merging deltas" (taken from real life software version control systems)

** In one particular inversion of this trope, one instance of a person returns to the solar system to find they have been made bankrupt by one instance of themselves, and are being sued by the children of another instance. The other clones are dead or missing, leaving them to take the rap...a person is explicitly "jointly and severally liable" for the actions of their other selves.

* In ''[[Otherland]]'', the members of the Grail Brotherhood conspire to produce the perfect computer simulation, into which they can clone themselves via [[Brain Uploading]] and hence achieve [[Immortality]]. To avert this trope, they arrange for their "real" bodies to commit suicide in various ways upon activation of their virtual clones (never mind that this plan goes horribly wrong when [[Psycho for Hire]] Dread takes over the system).

** The trope is played straight in the case of {{spoiler|Paul Jonas}}, who spends most of the story wandering through various simulated worlds, unaware that he's a virtual copy and the original is still alive in an induced coma. When he finds out, he realizes that everything he's accomplished is meaningless from a personal perspective, as his real body will [[Relationship Reset Button|have none of the accumulated memories]] and his virtual self can't ever be considered a real person. This sends him across the [[Despair Event Horizon]] but gives him the resolve to perform a [[Heroic Sacrifice]].

* Fabricants in the futuristic segment of ''[[Cloud Atlas]]'' are bred to perform all the unpleasant jobs humans no longer want to do (the ones we see the most of work in the fast-food industry, but there are mentions of others in even worse positions). They're bred and raised not to question their lot in life, and anyone who tries is faces intense opposition, the most obvious bit of [[Fantastic Racism]] being Sonmi's attempts to attend university lectures. {{spoiler|Oh, and once they finish their "careers", they get recycled into the "soap" that other fabricants eat.}}

* In Frank Herbert's ''WorShip'' series, clones are second-class citizens at best, disposable labor resources at worst. When there's a crisis or shortage, they always get the short end. They all have some identifiable mutation, adding [[What Measure Is a Non-Cute?]].

* Wil McCarthy's "The Policeman's Daughter" is a short story in which a copy takes legal action against his source material when he is unwilling to be reintegrated (as the ''Accelerando'' example above). The original's lawyer is copied for the copy's lawyer, and legal questions involve the potential personhood of a copy and whether their "deletion" is murder or just file maintenance.

* In Jeff Long's ''Year Zero'', adult human clones are created using ancient DNA, then used as expendable guinea pigs for research to cure an unstoppable plague. Not only are these clones fully sentient, but they retain the memories of their entire lives, up to and including their deaths, and so assume they're being punished in the afterlife.

 

 

** Interestingly, the Cylons are never seen to make clones of existing human characters, rather they were based around certain archetypes of personality and appearance. All people revealed to be Cylons were that way from the beginning. They were either self-aware but passing for human or had fake memories. By the end, it is strongly implied that the Cylons would not even have known how to go about cloning an individual human; most of them didn't know how their own system of downloading functioned.

*** The Number Eight models were unique among Cylons in that they disagreed with each other. All other Cylons were, apparently, similar enough in personality that they could be counted on to have any member of the model vote for the entire model line in a representative system, even though some of them had different individual experiences that might have affected their personalities. Then again, Boomer is also the only model of which any copies worked as unconscious sleeper agents, so that might explain the difference.