Polansky clones Ray Bradbury, others

Originally printed September 28, 2010.

Ray Bradbury should take great pride in the way his name gets invoked in Steven Polansky's new novel, "The Bradbury Report," about the ethical implications of human cloning.

Not only does Polansky name his narrator after the author of "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles" -- well, it's technically a pseudonym that the narrator chooses for himself -- but Polansky also seems to be cloning some of the best features of Bradbury's oeuvre: a lucidly written, well-paced account of a future world that looks very much like our own with only a few technological innovations thrown in.

In this case, Polansky moves the calendar forward to the year 2071 and imagines a world in which the United States' role as the only industrialized nation without a universal health plan evolves into a situation in which the U.S. is the only nation in the world in which human cloning is both legal and all but mandated. Since about 2050, Americans have been given the "option" of having a clone created to be used for harvesting organs and other body parts as necessary. Anyone who refuses to have a clone made, however, will have to pay for any medical procedures out of their own pockets.

Pulling on the insights from real life bioethicist Leon Kass's essay, "The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans," Polansky imagines a nation that, in order to solve its health care problems, suddenly finds itself needing to find a place to house 250 million clones in an area in which they will be isolated, protected and kept from a full understanding of why they exist. As a result, the U.S. government cleared out all the remaining people in North and South Dakota, moved the entire cloning infrastructure to those states and declared those "Clearances" to be off limits to everyone. Organizations opposed to this cloning industry set up in the states surrounding the clearances -- including Iowa -- and look for opportunities to create a 21st century underground railroad.

Ray Bradbury -- the narrator, not the novelist -- is a widower in his 60s who never really considered the ethical implications of this project when he agreed to have a clone made of him 20 years earlier. But when Ray's old college girlfriend, Anna, visits him and tells him that she has met and cared for his clone -- who somehow escaped from the Clearances -- he suddenly finds himself dealing with the painful memories of his own life as well as the inevitable identity crisis that comes when meeting a younger but genetically identical copy of yourself who is stronger, better looking and more clueless than you ever were.

"The Bradbury Report" itself is presented as the narrative that Ray writes after spending a year on the lam in Canada with Anna and the clone posing as a family. As such, the novel/report is a mixture of narrative forms and voices that includes sections from Anna's diary as well as passages that Ray wrote a year after the fact and passages written in the midst of the action. It includes the best guesses from Anna's organization about what life in the Clearances must be like -- since none of the members have ever been inside -- as well as direct evidence from the clone's behavior that proves the organization is wrong more often than right. (It's as if Polansky also decided to clone parts of "The Diary of Anne Frank" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaiden's Tale" and graft them on his Bradbury-inspired storyline.)

The result of such technological and ethical speculation could have been a very didactic story that merely preaches the dangers of cloning rather than develops characters and connects with readers. But Polansky has that same mix of lightness and directness about his story that made the real Bradbury into such a household name.

And contrary to Ray's assertion that his report will be a substandard literary account because he's not a very good writer, "The Bradbury Report" will prove to be equally appropriate (and welcome) reading for courses on novel writing or bioethics.

Press-Citizen Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com.

Our View - Boosting UI as a pop-culture research center

(Iowa City Press-Citizen "Our View," July 6, 2009)

J.J. Abrams' re-imagining of the "Star Trek" universe opened earlier this year to nearly universal acclaim -- receiving much more positive reviews than any of George Lucas' three Star Wars prequels. Variety called Abrams' film a "new and improved Star Trek" that will "transport fans to sci-fi nirvana." The New York Daily News wrote that Abrams, offering much more than "a coat of paint on a space-age wagon train," managed to blend successfully "the hip and the classic." Even Chicago Reader's negative review noted that Abrams failed primarily when he kept too much of the classic 1960s TV show's formula: "A relatively mindless thrill ride that would have made the old NBC execs grin from ear to ear."

But if long-time "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" fans are looking for a sure-fire way to revive their interest in how sci-fi has evolved over the past four decades, they should check out University Libraries' recent acquisition of the Mariellen (Ming) Wathne Fanzine Archive Collection. Not only does this collection of more than 3,000 science fiction fanzines represent an important accumulation of fan-created work, it also is a significant addition to the pop-cultural archive being amassed at University Libraries.

A UI news release said the Wathne Collection contains thousands of fanzines focused on popular television shows and films -- including some important early pieces related to "Star Trek." The 'zines related to "Star Wars" were originally collected by Lucasfilm Ltd., producer of the Star Wars series, and offered to fans in the 1990s. Wathne, a California fan, accepted it and began a lending library to distribute 'zines among fans.

In this light, Abrams' recent film can be seen as merely the big-budget version of how fans have been updating and personalizing sci-fi storylines for decades. Rather than remain passive consumers of the products produced by the film and television industries, fans have used their favorite characters, settings and storylines as the basic building blocks for their own creations. As technology has improved over the decades, so has the quality of these fan 'zines, Web sites and independent short films. To some, these products might seem the epitome of copyright infringement; to others, the copyright infringement is offered as the sincerest form of flattery.

"In many ways, fan culture pre-dates and anticipates our modern remix mash-up Internet culture," Greg Prickman, assistant head of Special Collections at University Libraries, said in a news release. "And there is a great deal of scholarly interest in this type of activity today."

The collection was acquired with the help of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to preserving and protecting works created by science fiction fans. University Libraries is working with the organization to establish the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which will help identify important collections and bring them to UI.

The recent acquisition of the Wathne Collection is just one more example of how libraries need to adapt to the opportunities presented in the 21st century or risk losing the cultural authority they've enjoyed for centuries. This archive of participatory culture will provide scholars and fans alike with a treasure trove of what helped make these shows and films into such cultural phenomenons.

It also will help in University Libraries' efforts to become an important research center for the study of 20th-century popular culture.