Thursday 2 April 2020

Chronology And Progress

"Un-Man."

The Un-Men are clones of Stefan Rostomily but there is more going on even than that. Trying to spot an undercover agent, Naysmith considers:

"...the little girl skipping rope in the park across the way. She might not be what she seemed: the biological laboratories could do strange things, and Fourre had built up his own secret shops -" (VI, p. 45)

Hold on there, Fourre! What are you doing now? And, having kicked themselves back with a nuclear war, can the people of this fictional timeline have progressed that far that fast? Sandra Miesel's "Chronology of Future" dates "Un-Man" to 2004. It cannot be much later because Fourre, who was young in 1945, is still alive, aged eighty. Also, this Chronology is based in part on one compiled by Poul Anderson and published in Starling Stories in 1955. Is there any extant information on that Chronology?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I did think these clones of Stefan Rostomily has to be among the earliest, if not actually the first, use we see in science fiction of cloning. And long before that word was coined. I almost wrote "cloned." (Smiles)

I see what you mean. Forty years or so seems somewhat implausible for all these drastic advances in technology.

Ad astra! Sean