The biologist Gordon Rattray Taylor is innocently responsible for this story. He has a chapter on cloning in his fine book The Biological Time Bomb. I read that, and then I wrote this. It is as near “hard-core” or wiring-diagram science fiction as I ever get; that is, it’s a working out of a theme directly extrapolated from contemporary work in one of the quantitative sciences—a what-if story. The theme, however, is developed qualitatively, psychologically. Essentially I am using the scientific element, not as an end in itself, but as a metaphor or symbol, a means of saying something not
...more
