Human Cloning - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Cloning is a recurring theme in a wide variety of contemporary science fiction, ranging from action films such as the 2000 film The 6th Day to comedies such as Woody Allen's 1973 film Sleeper.

Cloning has been used in fiction as a way of recreating historical figures. In the 1976 Ira Levin novel The Boys from Brazil and its 1978 film adaptation, Josef Mengele uses cloning to create copies of Adolf Hitler. A Parade of Mirrors and Reflections, a novella by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, centers on the cloning of deceased Soviet premier Yuri Andropov.

Several works of fiction portray a future in which human cloning has become the normal process of reproduction for various reasons. Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World envisions a futuristic world in which large numbers of clones are cultivated industrially and conditioned before birth for specific castes.

The implications of using clones to replace deceased loved ones are explored in several works of fiction. In Margaret Peterson Haddix's novel Double Identity, the main character discovers that she is a clone of her deceased older sister.

A recurring sub-theme of cloning fiction is the use of clones as a supply of organs for transplantation. The 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go and the 2010 film adaption are set in an alternate history in which cloned humans are created for the sole purpose of providing organ donations to naturally born humans, despite the fact that they are fully sentient and self-aware. The 2005 film The Island revolves around a similar plot, with the exception that the clones are unaware of the reason for their existence.

The use of human cloning for military purposes has also been explored in several works. The Clone Wars portrayed in the Star Wars franchise depicts the use of clones to rapidly create a well-trained and expendable army (Specified as being more adaptive than the droids used by the opposing military force for the same purpose).

The exploitation of human clones for dangerous and undesirable work was examined in the 2009 British science fiction film Moon.