The year is 2071. The United States government has implemented a wide-scale cloning program that is tied directly to health insurance. Each U.S. citizen has a “Copy” living separately in a cleared zone in the Midwest. In the two decades since the program’s inception, no person has ever seen their Copy or been inside the Clearances, and no clone has ever successfully escaped—until now.
The narrator, known only by the pseudonym “Raymond Bradbury,” is a sixty-six-year-old retired teacher who lives a solitary life. One day his quiet existence is disrupted by Anna, a woman he has not seen or spoken with since he broke her heart in college, who reveals she is now part of an illegal activist group that morally opposes cloning, and for the first time, a clone has escaped from the Clearances and come into her group's possession. Even more shocking, the clone is Ray’s. Ray agrees to meet his Copy and spend the next year on the run with his younger “self” and Anna while writing about the experience.
What follows is an epic and heart wrenching tale, and an exploration of one of the most pressing ethical dilemmas of the twenty-first century.
Polansky’s story feels familiar and new all at the same time, and perhaps it should go, like the Steampunks, on a shelf of its own. There you’ll also find Brave New World. ”
An inventive, cerebral thriller... Polansky does a fine job of wrestling with the moral dilemmas posited by writers like Philip K. Dick and others, and his characterization of Alan is sublimely witty and soulfully sympathetic.”
Ambitious…chilling…heartbreaking…Polansky does an extraordinary job of imagining the condition of being a human copy, while challenging readers to consider the ethicality and inhumanity of such human engineering.”
Just as in Beecher Stowe, Dickens, Orwell—and yes, Bradbury—Polansky’s outrage against human arrogance and cruelty is overwhelming, all the more so because the suffering human being in this case has no existence at all, apart from that which human arrogance and cruelty have bestowed upon him.”
