Re: (ReacTor) Five Books About Duplicating Human Beings

On 17/05/2025 19:10, Bobbie Sellers wrote:

  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
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For some reason, cloning or copying people never goes according to plan...
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https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-duplicating-human-beings/
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I've read two recently that fit here:
Reynolds - On The Steel Breeze
Mickey7 - Ashton
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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.
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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)
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Tony
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      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.

I'm not sure what is currently against human cloning,
besides laws against it.  Pet cloning, or a process
called cloning, has been available commercially
at least since 2015 (Viagen).
Strictly, we can say that cloning is not duplication
of a human being.  But science fiction human clones
often receive the memories of the original person.
Sometimes the soul.
A simpler clone would just be a child or embryo with
the original person's genes, or most of them.  Some
science fiction "clones" have a variation on one
original person's genes.
Instant material duplication of a person is distinct
from cloning, if perhaps not very different from the
person(s)' point of view.  Cloning is a process
which starts with one or more living cells and
a sample of genes from the original person.
Whether grown to adulthood over hours or minutes,
or built by 3-D printing with a stem cell sprayer,
and wherther the copy has the original's mind,
somebody else's mind, or none at all, it takes time.
I suppose the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia
covers this.  Or else The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy does.  In the radio version of that, Lintilla
is an intelligent young female archaeologist who was
meant to be cloned six times.  The cloning machine
jammed and can't be stopped without murdering the
latest clone, which, when we meet some of them,
is a very big problem.
Thus <https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/clones>
actually talks about matter-duplication first,
and transferring or duplicating the mind into
a pre-created body at the end, with semi-legal
transplant organ provision in between (organlegging).