Editorial

Not many years ago, cloning was pure science fiction; for example, a brief reference to "the Clone Wars" in Star Wars evoked images of hordes of genetically engineered soldiers without actually explaining any details. But the past five years have seen the emergence of cloning as a controversial public issue. Legislatures all over the world jumped into the realm of science fiction with bans on human cloning, even before anyone actually carried it out.

Unfortunately, these laws often seem to reflect a concept of cloning that's pure sci-fi: not careful exploration of new technologies and their social consequences (such as that in several of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels), but adventure stories where cloning provides evil adversaries with a new source of minions, or horror stories where mad scientists unleash destructive forces upon the world. This is a subject on which the attitudes of sf fans tend to be different, and more libertarian, than those of the general populace. Panels discussions of cloning at conventions tend to produce general agreement of both the panelists and the audience that cloning, as such, is in no way objectionable or fearful. In itself, like most technologies, it's morally neutral. It's the use to which it's put that makes it good or bad.

Lois McMaster Bujold explores these issues through the character of Mark Vorkosigan, a clone of her hero Miles Vorkosigan, created to steal his identity and assassinate both his father and the Emperor of Barrayar. Over the course of two novels, Mark rejects his creators' brainwashing and takes up the struggle for the rights of other clones. Initially hostile to Miles, he comes to accept Miles's viewing him as a brother—in effect, an artificial twin. In the eyes of Miles and his Betan mother, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, cloning is simply another way of achieving parenthood, and clones are people.

Robert Heinlein's Friday explores a world with different rules. His heroine in an Artificial Person, defined by Christian churches as soulless and by the law as property—and with her self-esteem so deeply wounded that she fails even to recognize her own rebellion against these rules. This is one of Heinlein's most powerful stories about the evils of race prejudice and slavery, with clones as a new oppressed race.

In these and other sf novels we see two key ideas about the ethics of cloning: that it needs to take place with the informed consent of the donors, and that the clones are human beings with human rights. These ideas are quite compatible with libertarian values. With legal rules based on these standards, cloning would have no ethical problems; it would be simply another way to have children. And the right to have children in this way is one that libertarians can join the sf community in defending.