Attack of the clones

Here’s what I know about the future.

In the future, everything will be white and minimal, robots will take care of all our needs (including sexual), and clones will exist in a miserable dystopia, usually with their heads shaved.

I got this through 30 years of watching science fiction movies, reading novels and even listening to music.

Clones are here to stay. In fact, they have been popping up quite a lot lately in literature and movies. A few obvious examples are last year’s Ewan McGregor-Scarlett Johansson vehicle, The Island, Kazuo Ishuguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones. Other recent "clone-themed" movies have been Aeon Flux (with Charlize Theron), Code 46 and God Bless the Child (with Robert De Niro as a nutty genetic scientist). In real life, cloning has been grabbing newspaper headlines, with Italian researchers now successfully cloning champion horses (which an American team promptly ran against non-cloned horses on a Texas racetrack) and a South Korean genetic researcher having to resign in disgrace after admitting his team fudged human cloning data.

In the US, the debate heats up between the left and right about the ethics of stem cell research (key replacement cells are cloned, instead of entire embryos). But in Hollywood, cloning has always been an up for grabs.

Dip back into the time machine, and even Woody Allen was there in 1973 with his hilarious take on Rip Van Winkle, Sleeper. In this farce, health food storeowner Miles Monroe (Allen) wakes up in 2273, where everything is – yes – white, including the wardrobe of future caretakers, the hover-cars, and even the Orgasmatron, which does everything its name implies. Allen even poses as a robot butler at one point.

Miles is abducted by The Resistance, however, which wants to overthrow the sterile society by killing The Leader, a white-haired, white-garbed figure in a wheelchair. However, an earlier assassination attempt blew up the leader – all that is left of him is his nose. No worry, though: scientists have now perfected the cloning technique, which is explained in a 1973 version of PowerPoint: "This is our leader’s nose. Through massive biochemical effort it has been kept alive for over a year. Now, through cloning, we intend to reconstruct our entire leader – a perfect copy."

Miles and Resistance gal Diane Keaton debate how to sneak into The Leader’s stronghold to "kidnap" the nose: "The time to strike is now! Their leader is suffering a terrific handicap: he has no head or body!"

The look of Allen’s early slapstick masterpiece may have been inspired by George Lucas’s THX-1138 (which itself seems inspired by the look of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange). In this sci-fi warm-up for Star Wars, Lucas posited, yes, a dystopian future in which drones – not clones – sporting shaved heads do their day jobs in a minimal white society that resembles a vast underground mall. The look was so influential that it popped up again in The Island, where McGregor and Johansson find out that they haven’t actually won the lottery, but are destined to become spare parts for rich clients who never want to grow old.

We have seen clones crop up in movies, novels, bad television, even silly ’80s music such as Alice Cooper’s We’re All Clones or in the weird, test-tube countenance of Gary Numan.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that an actual cloned animal made an appearance – thanks to mirthful Scottish scientists who named their cloned sheep "Dolly" after the blond-wigged, cantilevered country singer. Mice followed, then other mammals, and now even horses are ready to run the Kentucky Derby against their genetic duplicates.

But it’s when people start contemplating the cloning of humans that things get a bit darker. Ishuguro’s Never Let Me Down takes us into a private school for "special" children whose role in society is only made clear as the novel unfolds. Along the way, Ishuguro infuses his tale with a sense of dread and elegiac sadness for humankind. For this Japanese novelist, clones are definitely not fun and games.

Meanwhile, controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq (who lives in Ireland) has written several books with cloning scenarios, usually narrated in the clinical, detached manner of a scientist manipulating cells in a Petri dish.

Houellebecq writes books that only a misanthrope could love. For his characters, clones are the only "logical" replacement for humans, whose legacy on the planet is one of cruelty, violence and sexual degradation. Unlike Ishuguro, who infuses his sci-fi narrative with a wistful humanist air, Houellebecq simply goes for the throat. His characters are highly doubtful about whether mankind is really worth saving, and it is this restless question that makes reading Atomised (available in a different translated title as "The Elementary Particles") and his more recent The Possibility of an Island such a disturbing experience.

In The Possibility of an Island, Daniel is a comedian who makes a good living skewering the social mores of modern life. Comedy is not pretty in his hands. His routines make gleeful fun of Muslims, Christians and Jews, women and youth culture. It’s clear that his "comedy" masks a deep disgust with mankind, yet he still becomes rich and famous. This narrative is interspersed with chapters from 1,000 years in the future, where one of Daniel’s cloned replacements – Daniel24 – ruminates on the scattered, now-barbaric remnants of the human race, after a nuclear war has left only clones and lab-designed "neohumans" to inherit the planet.

Questions of whether clones have souls are set aside to focus on a more down-to-earth matter: Can clones experience love? The engineered descendents of Daniel do in fact still have deep feelings – for a cloned dog named Fox. True, love is reduced to a faint copy of its original rich promise, but even love for a dog is some kind of love. And for Houellebecq, that’s about as warm and fuzzy as it gets.

Until such matters are decided – in the future – we still have the many depictions of cloning in popular culture to guide us. Yes, the future is white and minimal (look at the original iPod, for instance), and shaved heads will always come back in style. Laugh at the many clones presented in movies and books if you must – they may seem comically dated. But cloning is catching up with science fiction. The future is a lot closer than we think.