Re: (ReacTor) Five Books About Duplicating Human Beings

On 5/9/25 05:35, Tony Nance wrote:

On 5/8/25 10:20 AM, James Nicoll wrote:

Five Books About Duplicating Human Beings
>
For some reason, cloning or copying people never goes according to plan...
>
https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-duplicating-human-beings/
>

 I've read two recently that fit here:
Reynolds - On The Steel Breeze
Mickey7 - Ashton
 The Ashton is somewhat parallel to your description of Goldin's book (which I have not read), in the sense that Mickey is an Expendable, meaning he is sent on very dangerous jobs, knowing he can be re-iterated from shared memory/files and a backup body. The alienation is baked in at the start for Mickey, as the majority of the crew don't know how to interact with him - so they largely don't.
 Some others I didn't see in the comments:
Banks - The Culture (esp as back-ups)
Zelazny - Lord of Light (reincarnation machines, body back-ups)
Taylor - We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Lee & Miller - Liaden Universe (Uncle, Dulsey, etc)
 Tony
 

Duplication of a human being is not cloning.
It requires that the human being is duplicated with the same
memories both physical and mental as the original person being
duplicated. Cloning a person results only in a new physical body.
That body has to age and grow gaining independent experience
Duplication takes something like the the Star Trek transporter
which has sufficient memory to hold the whole human database and
facilities for recreation in another instance.  It has been used in
stories to move instances of human persons to very remote as in
other star systems to solve problems or to cause them.
Science and technology are still a long way from cloning
people or duplicating them.
bliss- Dell 7730 Precision- PCLinuxOS 2025.05- Linux 6.6.90- Plasma 5.27.11