Apex Book Company

A few weeks ago, my high-tech thriller 7th Son: Descent was released by St. Martin’s Press. In its opening pages, a four-year-old boy assassinates the U.S. president…and after that, it’s a deep-sea dive into government conspiracies, computer hacking, five-minutes-into-the-future technologies and lots of automatic gunfire.

It’s mostly about cloning. Seven men discover that they’re unwitting participants in a human cloning experiment. Their flesh and childhood memories–recordings, transferred from a digital storage system to their blank cloned brains–hail from someone else.

When I was writing 7th Son: Descent, I thought a lot about human cloning. The science, the legality, the ethics, the dilemma. Should science go there? (If it hasn’t already, that is.) Should we let it? I pondered the far-off technology of recording human memories, storing them as digital data, and dumping them into blank minds. Should we embrace such innovations — and if so, how will that define (or redefine) humanity?

The book explores that stuff with a Pandora’s Box slant, and strongly suggests that human cloning is a bear trap well worth avoiding.

But do I personally believe that? Nope. I’m all for it.

Now, I’m not down with building clone armies, or manufacturing slave castes–none of the stuff that makes for great widescreen fiction. I’m cool with human cloning because it (and more important, the ability to record and transfer human memories) represents the next great age of our species. I’m also accepting of human cloning because it’s going to happen, regardless of how we presently feel about it.

Cloning flesh solves problems. Transplanted tissue rejection? Obsolete. Stealing skin from one region of the body for skin grafts? Ditto. Excruciating bone marrow transplants? Gone. Therapeutic cloning can help combat cancer, heart disease, diabetes. Shattered bones need not be mended…they could be replaced outright. With the proper technology, so could severed limbs. We can presume a full-formed human being need not be born (or “grown”) for these medical therapies.

Then there’s “reproductive cloning.” This is the stuff seen in 7th Son: Descent–full body human replication. This is the stuff that freaks people out. They spew frightened talk of soulless beings, or clones inheriting behaviors or complete memories through an unproven (and to me, preposterous) hypothesis called “cellular memory.” Clone Hitler, these folks say, and no matter how you raise him, you’ll still have another genocidal maniac on your hands.

That’s bullshit. Genetic predispositions would certainly be duplicated (from physicality to brain chemistry, aka “nature”), but the human experience is defined far more by nurture. Since cloned humans would be raised as any other child would, they would be as unique as identical twins are today. Thus, these humans would have souls, if you truck with the important–and valid–spiritual equation.

But the truly humanity-changing potential of cloning comes with the addition with the transference of recorded memories (or, less elegant, brain transplants) from one body to another. We need not die, not ever again. Those on death’s door could transfer their memories to younger copies of themselves. Our consciousness could live on for centuries, bebopping from meat machine to meat machine. Further, we could spend lifetimes in cloned bodies other than our own. Sex change operations? That’s so 20th century.

The human experience would fundamentally change.

I understand this technology could be abused; I literally wrote a page-turner about it. But my mind reels at the positive possibilities. From immortality, to truly conquering debilitating diseases, to resurrecting loved ones lost long before their prime, to even creating multiple copies of “you” that could go forth and pursue as many life goals as those “yous” wished…there is the potential for great good here.

Is it unnatural? Highly. Does it rewrite the human experience as we know it? Absolutely.

Is it needed? Not in traditionalists’ eyes. But that’s never stopped humanity from innovating and changing the world in unbelievable ways. The fact that you’re not actually reading letters here — you’re processing a presentation comprised of thousands of 1s and 0s — indicates the might of human ingenuity, and the eventual ubiquity of groundbreaking technology.

Human cloning isn’t here … but it’s near. Better start wrapping your brain around that eventuality. And if you’re intrigued by the possibilities to come, come join me in the cloning queue. I’ll be the first one in line.