UNREAL BRADBURY: You've damaged your lungs with too much smoking, or a valve in your heart blows out — what do you do? If you're living in the United States in the year 2071, rather than turn to a strange inventor like Dr. Madeleine, you simply take the organ that you need from a clone living in a government-controlled zone in the Midwest.

That's the scenario confronting Ray, the narrator of Steven Polansky's novel "The Bradbury Report". Yeah, I know, interesting choice of names, isn't it? 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" and Eric Garcia's "The Repossession Mambo" (made this year into the film "Repomen"). All of these books treat the human body as a cheap commodity in the future — something easily fixed with drugs and interchangeable parts. Today we call this fantasy, but some future generation of readers may of course call them prescient.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Welcome to utopia gone very, very wrong. Readers may find themselves reluctant at first to dip into the harsh, what-if future of Steven Polansky’s cautionary novel The Bradbury Report. Yet the undertow of this grievous new world is powerful.

It is the late 21st century and replacement parts for human bodies are in good supply. By donating vials of their blood, Americans painlessly participate in a governmental program to create clones who are harvested for body parts when their owners — known as “originals” — have medical emergencies.

No transplants are available for those individuals who find the program reprehensible and refuse to participate. But their numbers are few. Most people sign up without considering the consequences and have no idea how or where their clones live.

Similar to fantasy and sci-fi author Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic, Fahrenheit 451, Polansky’s novel focuses on the mundanity of evil. Bad things happen when good people blind themselves to what is unconscionable. Polansky manages to impart this lesson without preaching.

The central character of the author’s dystopian fable is a widower and retired math teacher known as “Ray Bradbury,” a pseudonym given to him by his friend, Anna, who is a member of the anti-cloning resistance movement.

As with the renegade fireman of Fahrenheit 451, Ray is an anti-hero drawn into action by accident. Both awaken to the wrong they have done and how they can partially right it.

Polansky’s Ray is childless and has been in an emotional stupor for decades since his wife died in childbirth. He hasn’t seen Anna since college, when she was infatuated with him but he eloped with her best friend.

Now Anna needs Ray’s help to protect a clone who has inexplicably managed to escape a huge, top-secret reservation known as “the Clearances” and located somewhere in the Dakotas. The clone looks almost exactly like Ray did in his early twenties, because Ray is his original.

In The Bradbury Report, Polansky’s greatest achievement is the detailed and loving manner in which he imagines the clone’s emergence into selfhood.

Alan, as he has been named by the resistance, moves from a mute, robotic, sedated existence into a delayed childhood of picture books, pizza, hockey games and walks in the park with his surrogate parents Anna and Ray.

Parts of Alan’s development advance at digital speed, including his late-night obsession with T.V. pornography that morphs into self-disciplined avoidance of the genre when Anna shows dismay.

Alan develops emotional depth, including love as well as despair when absorbing answers to difficult questions about the reasons for his existence. As Alan grows, so does Ray. Amid all the sadness, hope prevails for the persistence of humankind’s better traits.

Source: Seattle Post-Intellingencer

The year is 2071; the U.S. has become a rogue nation, the only country in the civilized world where cloning is legal and state sponsored. As a result, some 250 million clones are being kept sequestered ina top-secret, closely guarded area of the Great Plains called "The Clearances." What is their life like? What are they like? No one knows until the day one of them somehow wanders off the reservation and is captured by a shadowy anti-cloning resistance group. Rather improbably, one of the resistors, Anna, recognizes the escapee as being the clone of a former college boyfriend whom she hasn't seen in 40 years. Tracking him down, she persuades him to become the first "original" ever to meet his copy and--using the pseudonym "Ray Bradbury"--to write a report detailing the experience, a report that can be used against the government and its cloning program. This ambitious, sometimes chilling, sometimes heartbreaking novel is that report, a document that reveals as much about "Ray" and Anna as it does the clone. 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.

Source: Booklist

In the history of socially conscious fiction, the shift from the realism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hard Times to the speculation of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 reflects the growing difficulty of the moral imagination to keep pace with techno-political advances. This acceleration is dramatically evident in the debate over human cloning, which could now—if made legal—be accomplished through a relatively uncomplicated medical procedure. Could the manufacture of a cloned person ever be politically (if not ethically) sanctioned? If so, could cloning be undertaken through governmental control? These questions are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but the substance of academic debate. Political implementation never lurks far behind. And so, Steven Polansky’s fable of a man who meets his own clone—a creature processed under a classified U.S. government cloning program for the purposes of organ harvesting (for those citizens who can afford to pay for it)—may be projected as vintage 2071, but there is no reason why the unnerving scenario could not happen in our own lifetime, as so much else has. The title of The Bradbury Report is a tribute to the author of 451. “Ray Bradbury” is the pseudonym of the narrator, an old, disappointed and dying man, through whom Polansky plays an age-old literary trick: The teller has no muse inspiring him to speak, but only an absolute necessity to bear witness to the horror he has experienced (behold the Ancient Mariner). Artless as the narrator pretends to be, there are passages here that stand unsurpassed in the catalogue of speculative fiction for pure, shattering pathos. The existential quandary of Samuel Beckett’s characters cannot hold a candle to the cosmic despair of Alan, the clone, when he discovers who—or rather, what—he is. 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. The Bradbury Report shows us supremely well that to be human is to weep, and to weep is to be drawn in the first place from the womb, and no place else.

Source:BookPage

What would you say if you were tasked to harbor your own clone?

Debut novelist Polansky (Dating Miss Universe, 1999) returns to the publishing fold more than a decade after his first book of short stories with an inventive, cerebral thriller about a man faced with the ultimate moral quandary. “I am a man who doesn’t matter,” professes the narrator, a 67-year-old widower who adopts the moniker of the legendary sci-fi novelist Raymond Bradbury to tell his tale. “Bradbury” recounts his story from the year 2071, in an identifiable but deeply altered United States where human cloning has not only become possible but has also been made the focal point of a controversial governmental health-care system. Still mourning the death of his wife Sara, Ray is startled to hear from his old girlfriend Anna, now a member of an insurgent group that wants him to fulfill a most unusual request. “Here’s what my group wants you to do,” Anna says. “They want you to meet your clone. Face to face. They want you to spend time with him. Then they want you to write about how that feels, to write about what that means. To you.” Before long, the reluctant writer is on the run with Anna and clone 1123043468, a 21-year-old version of himself with zero knowledge of the world. The clone, dubbed Alan by his keepers, is one of the only known escapees from “The Clearances,” a massive dead zone in the upper Midwest where America’s copies are tended until they’re needed. 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. But readers may find the novel’s contrived moral crises and bleak denouement unsatisfying.

A reflective sci-fi story that overthinks its taxing ideas about copycat humanity.

Source: Kirkus Reviews