Last year, whilst daydreaming one afternoon, I came up with a plot and outline for a science fiction novel that included a near-future society in which cloned and genetically altered humans made up a large portion of the population. They were a genetically engineered slave race, of course. It might have been a bit of boilerplate SciFi, but I thought the name I came up with for the cloned slaves was clever. They were called "constituents".
They were made, you see, from the re-constituted bits of humans.
I thought it was amusingly ironic.
There was another planet involved and all sorts of things and the main character was an archaeologist, one of the last of his almost entirely defunct discipline, since, of course, in the near future, when everyone has three ipods and a constituent to make the tea in the mornings, who needs to know anything about human history or origins?.
Maybe I'll get around to it one day.
I got most of the ideas from various horrifying apocalyptic nightmares I'd had over the years, but only the really scary ones. The ones that made me want to not go back to sleep for a year.
It got complicated when I had to start looking up Urgaritic texts from the ancient near east and studying the mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross.
It's sooo easy to become distracted when researching.
3 comments:
I kid you not that a Salesian at my university lectured about the end of the world one day, and said that the idea that God would destroy the planet was 'ridiculous'.
What is really going to happen, (he says with a straight face and in Latin) is that we are going to end up cloning ourselves, except these 'humans' won't have souls, but be merely animals, and then they would turn against us and not stop 'till they killed every last one of us.....To back up his 'theory' he actually quoted Hesiod and said he had foretold all this in the Uranos/Kronos/Zeus myth (at this point he reads from the Greek, but then switches back to Latin).......
All I can say is that for once I was exceedingly glad that most people in my class didn't understand a word of what he said.
What is trully ridiculous is that God will not destroy the world when there are 'priests' spouting such nonsense.
That makes me worry about the poor future clones. Who's to say they won't have souls? It wouldn't be very nice to have a soul and be treated like a mindless potential killer.
Re: Karen,
Twins that occur in nature have souls, as do those conceived illicitly. If the human lives, he is by definition a being with a hypostatic union of matter and spirit .
So you are right to be concerned about that assumption, because that just works to the advantage of the culture of death and the spirit of deception from which it flows.
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