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Baaaaaaaaaa humbug.
I am a clone, I am not alone...
If you had ever seen us you'd rejoice in your uniqueness
And consider every weakness something special of your own — Robert Calvert (Hawkwind), "Spirit of the Age"
"If we outlaw cloning, then only outlaws will have clones."
— Sifl, The Sifl and Olly Show
In the real world, genetic clones are actually fairly common. When created from the same single cell at fertilization, they're known as "identical twins". When created through asexual reproduction, (in some plants, bugs, fish, sharks and even birds) they are parthenogenetic offspring.
More rare, but increasing, are the recently pioneered artificially created biological clones, like Dolly the Sheep.
None of this has anything to do with Speculative Fiction, where clones are totally different, and being a clone absolutely sucks. It's enough to make a clone sing the blues.
Though real artificial clones have to start at conception and go through childhood all over again, and can even have phenotypes that vary from their parent, Speculative Fiction clones are like perfect meta-xerox copies of the cloned person. They are exactly like the target at the moment of cloning, (possibly excused by age acceleration) with all their forebearers' memories and skills, although their personalities can develop from there.
As a result, many clones brood about how they're not "real," just hollow imitations of the original. The clones tend to deal with this rather badly. Some make desperate attempts to act different. Others go mad and try to murder the original to take their place. (Emphasis on "try" — hardly any succeed.) If the clone is a main character, they will spend the whole show angsting about how they're the Tomato In The Mirror. Occasionally they will have powers just like the Artificial Human. This often just ups their feelings of alienation, though.
That's for the lucky clones who are created properly. In many shows, cloning is an imprecise science, so there is a high probability that any clone will turn out to be an Evil Twin — almost as high as the probability of creating an evil computer (Because everyone knows that Science Is Bad). Other unlucky clones will just have birth defects or be increasingly inexact duplicates.
And that's for the clones who are just unlucky. The really unlucky clones have malevolent creators who can make custom clones, sometimes in bulk — which are exact meta-xerox copies of the original except that they have fanatical loyalty to the creators. Or the innate skills of a ninja assassin. Or superpowers. Or just add some alien DNA to create Half Human Hybrids, or even a different set of reproductive organs. Or all five at once — and those clones will still look, act, and think exactly like the original in every other way. You can expect all that tinkering to make something Go Horribly Wrong, too. A clone like this is always considered highly expendable by their creator, except in rare cases where said Evilutionary Biologist has developed an attachment to it.
Because of all this (or possibly as a cause of all this), clones get very little respect. Heroes who hesitate at killing intelligent life might still kill their evil clone. In the question of What Measure Is A Non Human, most clones rank somewhere between the Big Creepy Crawlies and the Mecha Mooks. Interestingly, on the question of What Measure Is A Non Unique the only clone that matters is the last one... provided the original is dead.
This assumes the clone ever had a mind of its own, of course. Sometimes a clone is an Empty Shell without the original's Soul, and exists only so that the creator can overwrite their mind and personality onto it in case of accident. In this case, it's more like coming Back From The Dead — although if the clone has a mind of its own at the start, this is yet another reason its life sucks. And let's not debate how Our Souls Are Different, in which case clones (especially of the deceased) will be soulless abominations before God and nature.
Some clones aren't biological clones at all — they're robot doubles, or copies created by the good old transporter. These have more reason to be exact xerox copies — but they get even less respect.
Unrelated to Cloning Gold or Something Blues. See also Scale Of Scientific Sins and Creating Life.
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Anime & Manga
Comics
- During the Marvel Universe Civil War, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, and Hank Pym manufacture a programmable clone of Thor from genetic material collected when Iron Man first met him. He mercilessly kills C List Fodder Black Goliath, somewhat exceeding his programming, and ends up messily disposed of by one of Thor's old friends, Hercules.
- When the real Thor comes back, he is not happy at what has transpired.
- In Fred Perry's Gold Digger, Brianna, the third Digger sister, is actually a clone/Biological Mash Up of Gina and Brittany. After her accidental creation, she quickly goes nuts and tries to eliminate her "sisters" (due to a curse that was the reason for the process that created her), though they eventually manage to talk her down. Even then, for several issues afterwards, Brianna has something of an identity crisis. By "several issues", about fifty or so, on and off.
- The character Array from Gold Digger avoids most of the usual clone problems; she's able to create new versions of herself, complete with suitable personalities, apparently at will and dismiss them later with the only side effect being that any new identity created is permanent — any of her personas whose body is currently not in use instead ends up sharing her brainspace. Since they're all still aspects of "her" (and seem to share a telepathic link even over long distances), they actually get along rather well.
- The Spider-Man comic book, and its infamous "Clone Saga" (which ran long enough to include every single thing mentioned above). It was definitely a Dork Age, but the named, important clone — Ben Reilly — was well liked by some fans. For years, continuity completely failed to mention him — the effect that losing his "brother" would have had on Peter was totally skipped. More recent comics occasionally will mention his name, and some fans hope that One More Day might at least mean that Ben still lives.
- Which is funny, because Ben was The Scrappy of the clone saga. Fanboys are fickle.
- The recent retcon has many of them so peeved that now they see all previous Dork Ages as relative.
- And then there's the Ultimate Marvel version which compresses the entire thing into less than 24 hours and makes both the Scorpion and Spider-Woman I/Jessica Drew altered Peter Parker clones. In the end, it's revealed all the clones were created by Otto Octavius, hired by the U.S. government.
- Then there's the Spider Girl version, which combines the clone plot with a long body-snatching/body-switch subplot, and Peter Parker undergoing a People Puppets procedure with Norman Osborn.
- Jean grey being copied by the Phoenix Force, and a direct clone with Madelyne Pryor.
- The there's Stryfe. Basically a clone of Cable, who's the son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor. As a baby, Cable got infected with a techno-organic virus (dont' ask) and sent to the future to be cured. Well that turned out to be a lie. The future doctors didnt' think he could be saved, so they cloned him. The clone was then kidnapped by Apocalypse. This classic villain wanted to raise the boy as his heir, then take over his body. When he found out Stryfe was a clone, he got discarded. Well to make a long story slightly less long, Stryfe went nuts, travelled back in time to before he was even born, and began playing at being an ineffectual mutant terrorist, running an organization staffed with losers. Turned out the whole thing was a Xanatos Gambit to turn X-Men on each other, frame Cable for murder, and Mr. Sinister and Apocalypse as the masterminds behind it all, while he kidnapped his own mother and father, beat the snot out of the Big-A, and finally unveiled himself to the cast. The reason for all his machiavellian manipulation and tomfoolery? To avenge himself on his parents, both physical (Cyclops & Phoenix) and spiritual (Sinister & Apocalypse). The kicker? It's technically subverted because Stryfe believed he was the *original* and that Cable was the clone who stole *his* life.
- Joseph (Magneto's clone). All came to bad ends.
- There is also X-23, a Tyke Bomb Opposite Sex Clone of Wolverine. Her psychological issues could fill a whole storyline themselves. And that's in the X Men Evolution original. In the comics it gets even worse: after escaping from the lab she was created in (and being triggered to kill her 'mother' along the way), then is held and interrogated by SHIELD. When she gets away from them, she ends up as a streetwalker (specializing in cutting and/or being cut by her clients) for a time.
- X-23, however, discarded the 'I'm not real!' aspect of this trope approximately an issue after first feeling a twinge of it. While X-Force were slaughtering numerous clones of the Marauders, and justifying it as 'just clones'. Her friends are jerks.
- Except Elixir.
- Marika Utika of Twin Spica. Not only is human cloning illegal by international treaty, the whole Replacement Goldfish status doesn't help.
- The Mauler Twins of Invincible are a mutated mad scientist and his clone. They simply cannot agree on which was the original, and consider this important because he created the clone to be his servant.
- Eventually, a sequence of events occurs which guarantees the original- whichever he may have been- is now dead. The Twins miss a single beat... And then commence arguing over which is the lower-generation clone!
- They are also, coincidentally, blue clones.
- And then things get a bit more insane from that point on. The Maulers have always been obsessed with not noticing any differences between them; the cloning process overloads the senses so it's never quite actually clear what is what or who is who or so on...
- In the classic Goodwin/Simonson Manhunter run, the bad guys have an army of brainwashed clones of the hero, providing them with useful cannon fodder and him with a desire to kill every last clone to reclaim his individuality. Somewhat creepily, after his death his friends attempt to hunt down and kill all the remaining clones—with the apparent approval of Batman, one of the most stringent advocates of Thou Shalt Not Kill in The DCU.
- It gets worse, since at least two clones have since turned out alive and heroic - one in the mid-1970s Secret Society of Supervillains early issues, and the other one much more recently in Kurt Busiek´s Power Company.
- In The Warlord, Deimos creates a clone of Morgan's son Joshua, ages it to adulthood, and sends it to attack Morgan, leading Morgan to believe he has killed his own son.
- In Mister Blank, the Mad Scientist Doctor Ixcel creates a superpowered clone of the main character, Sam Smith. Both Sam and the clone insist they're the original, but otherwise get along quite well.
- Lobo from The DCU. For some time, he automatically cloned. Cut him deep, the blood makes another Lobo. This was eventually nuetralized by the Magnificent Bastard, Vril Dox, except for one clone who manages to slip off. Said clone improves his brain, hunts down Lobo and...both fall into bunker which is bombed silly. One crawls out and goes on about how he's not going to reveal who lived. Lobo tends to be aware of the Fourth Wall, a seeming explanation for why he is tight-lipped.
- Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man from the Marvel Universe. For some time, his clones were cool with being who they are. Then things started getting weird. One turns traitor and joins with the long-term X-Men enemy Mister Sinister (no, really, that's his name). Another dies of the Legacy Virus. Jaime starts going around the bend because he's just too much people for one man. Later, he gets it together but his clones don't. All the thousands of aspects, idiotic or not, in the human mind tend to get manifested in his clones. He can and has created a clone to free him from a prison cell but it's possible the clone will be his sadness and be too depressed to move. Another is unpredictable and tries to kill an old ally. It is reabsorbed but indicates that it could pop out in any future clones and go try to kill again.
- Transmetropolitan uses braindead clones for rather... specific purposes.
- In Witch (the comic) the 'astral drops' were initially just magical clones of the protagonists, created to stand in for them while they're off saving both worlds, and apparently fine with that lot in life. However, after Will creates a flawed clone, they start gradually developing their own personalities, eventually rebelling against their creators. Who, in a subversion of What Measure Is A Non Human, decide to set them free.
- Some versions of Superman's enemy, Bizarro, are a clone of the Man of Steel.
- Also from the Superman mythos, Superboy (Kon-El/Conner Kent) is a clone made from half-Superman's DNA, and half Lex Luthor's DNA. That's right, Superman and Lex Luthor technically had a kid. This is the stuff Smallville shippers live for...
- In Calvin And Hobbes, Calvin creates a bunch of clones of himself. Predictably, they grow disgruntled at his self-serving leadership and more or less rebel until he is able to transmogrify them into worms. But they aren't doing anything unnatural - they act exactly as Calvin would
- Calvin thinks he solves the problem by cloning only his good half. The "Good Calvin" promptly openly crushes on Susie and pursues her, but is rejected thinking it's another one of Calvin's trick. The Good Calvin gets into a fight with regular Calvin, angry that his original is such a lowlife that Susie won't give him the time of day, and then disappears in a puff of logic when he realizes he had an evil thought.
- In Judge Dredd, Dredd is a clone of Chief Judge Fargo, as is his Evil Twin Rico, and several other Judges, including another one called Rico. They were "artificially aged" to five, and from then aged normally (the latter Rico is therefore noticeably younger than Dredd, the oldest Judge on the force). While the assumption behind the cloning programme is that clones of great Judges make great Judges, this does not appear to be the case (Dredd himself may be the ultimate Judge, but as well as the first Rico there's Judge Kraken, who was More Than Mind Controlled by the Sisters of Death and turned to The Dark Side, and Cadet Dolman, who didn't have a Face Heel Turn, but did say Screw Destiny and quit to be an astronaut).
- The Star Fox comics did a little bit of this, both cases involving Andross.
- In the first 1992 Nintendo Power comic by Benimaru Itoh, Andross is killed when the Dodora he is controlling steps on his ship. His two assistants, one of whom is named Herbert, take a hair sample and revive his DNA, creating two copies of him. Trouble arises when one turns out to be a softy when it comes to Fox's mom (Vixy). The other wants to remain extra-ruthless.
- There was a short Star Fox 64 manga, but with only one Andross.
- The Japanese-only Star Fox: Farewell Beloved Falco has Captain Shears trying to resurrect Andross on Titania. A successful clone is almost made, until Slippy Toad stops the process right before it finalizes.
Films
- The Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence pronounced, for plot reasons, that clones could only exist for a single day before some meta-phlebotinum law of the space-time continuum destroyed them. This was filmed after Dolly the Sheep demonstrated the utter dullness of clone life.
- This wasn't so much cloning, as genuine resurrection of the original person to a new body.
- Occurs in Alien Resurrection. The main character is Ripley 8, a clone of the original Ellen Ripley who, in Alien 3, committed suicide to prevent the birth of an Alien queen. About midway through the film, she discovers the fates of Ripleys 1-7: Cloning someone who fell hundreds of feet into a lake of molten rock while impregnated with an alien parasite is not an exact science.
- The five brothers in The City Of Lost Children, who can't figure out who is the original and who are clones.
- The Island starts off in an enclosed habitat somewhere on an apparently ruined and frozen Earth. People who live in the habitat can't get out because of a virus that'd kill them instantly, and are kept happy and given something to look forward to with the "lottery", which will eventually grant a lucky few a place on the Island, the last uncontaminated place on Earth. Things quickly start to go downhill when the main character finds a live insect from the outside. To make a long story short, it turns out the habitat is fake, all the people living within it are clones, the frozen Earth is a hologram, and those who win the Lottery are actually brought in the real world and sliced up to get organs, body parts and children. The whole thing is a giant body part backup bank.
- In Moon, Sam, the only human crew member on a Mega Corp moon base, discovers that he is only one of a very large number of cloned Sams with Fake Memories, each being employed for a three-year "contract period" (which is really a life expectancy) before he's directed into a suspended animation chamber to be "picked up" (read: disposed of.) He finds the Tomato In The Mirror when he gets into an accident No One Could Survive and is rescued by his successor.
- In Species 2, Eve, a clone made from the half-alien hybrid Sil, is kept in a female-only environment and studied for weaknesses so that if another incident occurs like it did in the first movie, the attacker can be destroyed efficiently. Things go badly for all concerned.
- This is the central plot point of Star Trek: Nemesis, in which Picard discovers that the Romulans developed a clone of him for use in a Zany Scheme that was later abandoned. Even though this clone made it through the first twenty years of his life having had no contact with the original Picard, he still develops a massive inferiority complex and constantly justifies his actions as being "exactly" what Picard would have done if he had been raised in the same situation, rather than accept that he is his own person.
- Played with rather disturbingly in The Prestige: a magician has a machine built that creates an exact duplicate, memories and all, in order to perform an amazing "teleportation" trick. The duplicate, essentially being the same person, would go on to complete the show, while the original falls through a secret trap door and drowns and has his corpse secretly disposed of every night. The magician essentially clones himself and then commits suicide for the sake of his magic.
- In The Sixth Day, we follow the main character Adam Gibson as he stumbles on an evil plot involving clones. Halfway through fighting the organization who he believes has put a clone of him in his place, he finds out that he is the clone; the one living in his house with his wife is the real Adam. He is pretty disappointed, but he quickly recovers and enlists the original Adam to help him destroy the conspiracy.
- The woman in the Quirky Miniboss Squad, upon awakening after coming out of the clone tank, is pissed that she was obviously killed and has to get her ears pierced and hair coloured again.
- In Solaris, the crew of a space station are each faced with the person most important to them, in the flesh, even when that person is dead. These creations function as clones of the original person with only some of their memories. And one crew member, Snow, turns out to be a clone. The person most important to the original Snow was himself, and so he created his own clone unintentionally. Then the clone killed him, stuffed him in an air duct, and took over the dead man's life.
- Boba Fett from Star Wars is described as a precise genetic copy of his "father" Jango, unlike the clone troopers, who were genetically engineered to allow accelerated growth, among some other changes. Thus, Boba ages at a normal rate (he is seen as a child in Attack of the Clones). Being genetically identical to Jango, however, does not stop him from contracting a disease called "clone degeneration" at the age of 71 in the novel Bloodlines. Why this condition only affects clones is anyone's guess.
- That might make some sense if cloning in the Star Wars verse is as tricky as it is in ours. Many, many clones of adult organisms die young because they get an early dose of chromosomal degeneration.
- The Hayflick limit
 is what these clones are running up against. You'd think sufficiently advanced technology would have overcome the problem, or that they would have been careful to start with pluripotent stem cells.
- It should be noted that Boba spent some time in the Sarlacc, which contributed to his health decline.
- When the clone army arrives and is immediately put to use fighting the droid army of the Separatists, no one in the Republic seems to give a damn that millions of men were mass-produced with the sole intention of being cannon fodder in an unpopular war, including the Senators who were against the war to begin with! Said soldiers were either mentally conditioned or press-ganged into service, unless they expect us to believe that just because they come from Jango Fett's genetic material, they're willing to be soldiers in a war they had no say in. The general impression from the films is that the clone's lives are no more valuable than the droid army they're fighting. And that's all before they murder the Jedi at the command of Chancellor Palpatine, and it's strongly implied by the films that the stormtroopers in the original trilogy are from the same stock of clones. Brainwashed, blindly loyal, or unwilling to stand up to an evil regime? Who cares? It's fun when the heroes shoot them by the dozen!
- Lampooned in Multiplicity as Michael Keaton duplicates himself (and the clones duplicate themselves), with each clone having a different personality.
Literature
- Matt, in Nancy Farmer's House of the Scorpion, is treated like crap by most of the people in the world simply because clones are normally reduced to the intelligence level of invalids. It doesn't make it better for him when he discovers that he was not meant to replace El Patron as ruler of Opium, the fictional nation in the book, but to be harvested for organs once El Patron's went bad.
- In the Deathstalker novels by Simon R. Green, we have Evangeline Shreck (cloned before the series starts to replace the Evangeline who was killed by her father when she wouldn't let him rape her), and the clone of High Lord Dram. And that's not to mention the clones (and sometimes esper clones) that the empire enslaves for labor.
- Clones in the Dune novels, called gholas, are realistic to an extent in that they are created as embryos, and must fully gestate and grow up at a normal rate. The similarity ends there, though — a ghola can be "shocked" into recovering all the memories its original had up until the moment of death, even if the original was still alive at the time his cells were harvested. (Note that this applies for ALL humans, not just clones. In Dune, you possess all the memories in your entire lineage).
- Gholas originally weren't strictly clones. Up until the third book in the series, gholas are the actual bodies of the deceased. They're just placed into axlotl tanks as quickly as possible, which essentially regrows the dead tissue and brain cells enough that the body is brought back to life. The body has no memories of its former life. But then, the Bene Tleilax engineered a Xanatos Gambit that resulted in the ghola having their psyche exposed to something their former life would vehemently oppose, which shocks their mind into reawakening. The later novels have gholas grown from simple cells, rather than the original body, so they are true clones — but they are still known as gholas because the term evolved over time to encompass a far more complicated definition. They still have the stigma of necromancy, though.
- The clones in William Sleator's The Duplicate have it rough. First off they get less and less sane the farther from the original they are, and even the sanest ones develop black marks on their hands and die abruptly. And since they're not convinced that they are copies (they're physically and mentally identical to the original until the marks appear), this all feels monstrously unfair.
- The protagonist cloned himself. Unfortunately, the clone believed he was the original and in turn cloned himself, and that clone ALSO thought he was the original. Unfortunately for them, clones tend to develop mental illnesses quickly. The second clone became clinically depressed; the first one was basically the original's Evil Twin.
- In Xenocide, one of the sequels to Ender's Game, Ender enters a dimension that allows you to create anything that you can hold perfectly in your mind. Ender unintentionally creates copies of his siblings. The copies eventually deduce that they aren't clones of the original siblings per se, but manifestations from Ender's mind: the personification of Ender's innocence and kindness in his sister, and of his ambition and ruthlessness in his brother. This causes both copies to angst endlessly until they are re-integrated by Ender's death and the copy-sister's loss of her body.
- In Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels, The Thrawn Trilogy, an insane Jedi named Joruus C'baoth clones Luke Skywalker from the hand he left behind in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke shows no compassion towards his clone Luuke at all, and Mara's compulsion/curse to kill Luke is satisfied by killing Luuke, so she doesn't differentiate between them either. Now granted, C'baoth may have replaced parts of Luuke's brain, but none of the protagonists ever treat him as a sentient being. Of course, Zahn also subverts the trope by having C'baoth, one of the main antagonists, be a clone. His insanity is a side effect of faulty cloning procedures, but he is treated by the other characters as a person in his right.
- A point of contention to be made here: "Luuke" had been utterly mindscrewed by Joruus (who in turn was implied to have been altered by Palpatine, but the 2006 sequel novel Outbound Flight indicated that he was faulty materials to begin with) to the point where he was a meatpuppet, who might not have survived without C'baoth pulling his strings; a similarly altered person (an Imperial general a few dozen pages prior) had died within a few hours when C'baoth was forced to leave; the only reason there is a "might" in the above sentence is that C'baoth finished the procedure on Luuke, and the general was left halfway done. With all this, there's a good question if Luuke still counts as sentient.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe plays with this trope in all possible ways:
- Thrawn's human based clones are treated vastly different, depending on characters. Some (Imperial die-hards) flat out hate them and are discriminatory. This was initially indicated as being a side-effect of the Imperial "humans first" doctrine, putting them in a second-class status to the "properly-generated" humans, but was then retconned with the Clone Wars.
- The majority of the Imperial Army regards the above clones as mere tools. A Moff is absolutely horrified to find that the major he was working with is a clone.
- Others, on both sides, see no difference between a clone and a normal human. Luke and Mara both exhibit this opinion in the ''Hand of Thrawn duology, also written by Zahn, and take this logic to its natural conclusion when Luke decides to not kill a not yet mature clone of Grand Admiral Thrawn because it hadn't done anything wrong. And then kills him anyway, more or less by accident but as a direct result of the stupid extremes he went to in avoiding overuse of his powers. Note that the clone of Thrawn is also a a blue clone.
- Leia and Han encounter several clones of Soontir Fel, which were inserted as sleeper agents on an agrarian planet. They're both uneasy around them, but the clones just want to be left alone — they don't have any loyalty to the Empire. While the Solos are uneasy, they try to treat Fel's clones normally; this doesn't work well.
Carib: You're [Leia] a sophisticated woman, a politician and diplomat, fully accustomed to dealing with the whole spectrum of sentient beings. And you're good at it. Yet you, too, feel uncomfortable in our presence. Admit it.
- A species in the Expanded Universe decided that they had reached the absolute peak of their species and so decided to freeze their entire civilization at this point of absolute perfection. Every member of that species has been cloned again and again and again, and they entered a static phase that lasted 5000 years. Also, they kept evidence by numbering the clones.
- Meanwhile, the Clone Wars novels make it clear just how much life sucks for the clone troopers — they have no pay, no leave, and no votes. If they're too badly injured to be capable of battle afterward, then they tend to get euthanised. Deserters are executed. Oh, and did we mention the age acceleration — growing old twice as fast, or faster under the stresses of battle?
- At least the current Star Wars CGI series has the heroes treat the clones as individual sentient beings. This is a big, welcome surprise to the clones.
- Cloned stormtroopers are indoctrinated so much that it seems they have trouble figuring things out; 622, at least, has no idea if his loyalty is from free will.
- The X Wing Series had the clone of Ysanne Isard, who believed herself to be the original and looked the same except for a nasty scar and no memory of how she got it. The real Isard, in an Enemy Mine/prelude to betrayal, told the Rogues to go kill her; they had no objection to what amounted to assassination despite generally being shown as unwilling to kill outside of battle. This clone is subsequently called "the Isard clone" by the narration and is taunted by the Rogues into realizing that she is a clone before they kill her.
- A bit of supplementary material for the Dark Forces Saga reveals that the prototypes for dark troopers — robotic stormtroopers — were aging veterans from the Clone Wars with, in some cases, seventy percent or more of their bodies replaced by cybernetics. The ones who made it into the field were very effective. But no-one asked them first, and a lot of them couldn't tolerate being forcibly made into cyborgs and committed suicide. Considering the Fantastic Racism directed towards clones and cyborgs...
- Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go depicts the kids growing up in a special boarding school, carefully told and not told about the total lack of any real future and any choice in their life as they will all go on to be carers for donors and then donors themselves (they seem to be universal donors). Strangely, none of them ever try to run away or escape their fate.
- Speaking of clones who get it rough, hardly anyone could compare with Honorverse genetic slaves. Not only are they mass-produced to be nothing more than property (a common slur from their Mesan masters is cattle), but they are also commonly raised "conditioned" for their service, which often included various violent "adjustments" ranging from simple beatings to gang-rape. At the ripe old age of six upwards.
- This practice is not widely approved of within the setting. Owning slaves — genetic or otherwise — is illegal in advanced societies. But there are still more than enough customers in the galaxy to keep the Mesans in business.
- Unfortunately, the (overwhelmingly) largest and most powerful civilization in the galaxy, the Solarian League, refuses to shut down slaving outright because of a great deal of political influence held by Mesa.
- The replacement clones from Jackson's Whole in Lois Mc Master Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga series hardly have anything better; they are raised in farms to be, not just slaves, but also replacements for the aging bodies of the rich and powerful through brain transplants. Guess where their original brains go. Elsewhere in the Galaxy, cloning, while unpopular, is a somewhat tolerated and well-regulated practice, and clones enjoy all the basic rights.
- In Brothers in Arms, we learn that a clone was made from Miles Vorkosigan years ago, when the original was just six years old, in a long-running Xanatos Gambit to substitute the clone for the original once the clone was adult enough that the six-year age difference wouldn't matter. The "artificial growth and memory implantation" parts of this trope are averted: the clone goes through normal growth and receives regular briefings on the original's activities so that his impersonation will be realistic. The original eventually defeats the plot by treating the clone as a real person with an identity (and a name) of his own, something the clone's creators never did; this triggers the clone's Heel Face Turn. This takes about four books.
- The "artificial growth" part isn't averted - it's inverted. The original has a chronic condition acquired during fetal development that has stunted his growth and left his bones extremely brittle. The conspirators who created his clone found, to their frustration, that he was growing up taller and stronger than the original, and subjected him to repeated radical surgeries to correct the 'problem' - then later, as the original had his brittle bones surgically replaced by artificial ones, the clone was put through the same surgery each time, to keep him 'up to date'. Even long after the clone's Heel Face Turn, he was left suffering a deep-seated aversion to surgical procedures (among other things.)
- Further, Mark (the new name for the clone) and Miles are as different as night and day in their fields of interest. Although they are identified as having certain inborn traits — they are both highly intelligent, for example — the ways those traits express themselves differ vastly between the two. Miles is a military nut with a preference for brunette amazons; Mark is a scheming business man who likes voluptuous platinum blonds.
- The identity politics behind clones and cloning are discussed at length in Mirrordance. Since cloning is an accepted technology on Beta Colony, they have an extensive network of legal definitions and protections from clones. Cordelia, who is Betan, identifies herself to Mark as either his mother or his mother-once-removed, with legal obligations and rights approximately equivalent to a grandparent. And points out that regardless of his cloned status, his genes are half hers anyway, so she has much biological interest in him as she does in his brother.
- In Alfred Slote's Clone Catcher, clones are walking organ banks for the rich (and since there's no magic aging, they have a good long time to know that). The guy who hunts them down if they run is the book's protagonist. And it's a children's book. (Almost every character in the book comes to condemn these practices, but it's still an awfully creepy premise.)
- In The Goodness Gene, the main protagonist discovers he is a a clone of Hitler, created solely to lead a dictatorship in the Dominion of the Americas; he—understandably—goes into Heroic BSOD mode.
- In the Skullduggery Pleasant books by Derek Landy, protagonist and budding sorceress Valkyrie Cain has an enchanted mirror from which she can extract her reflection. She sends the reflection to attend school and suchlike while she fights magical crime as the sidekick of Skullduggery Pleasant, magician-detective and animated skeleton (bad war wounds). At the end of each day, she puts her reflection back in the mirror and absorbs the memories it accumulated. The reflection acts just like her when it's out on its own, but only because that's its job. When face to face with Valkyrie, it is clearly a soulless image with no will of its own. (Or is it? Skullduggery warns her that she uses that reflection way too much. It may be developing a life of its own.)
- In Dean Koontz's Frankenstein triology, Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein, has created a "New Race" of genetically-engineered beings that are devoid of morality and feelings except for anger, envy, fear, and hate. They cannot disobey his commands, kill themselves, or kill others unless ordered to do so. Courtesy of direct-to-brain data downloading for the sake of knowledge, a great many of the New Race are replicants of people like politicians, police officers, and ministers. But the programming of many members of the New Race is breaking down, allowing them to act as they shouldn't in one way or another...
- In the novel Altered Carbon, digital copies of human psyches can be replicated and transferred to other bodies. This happens two ways: the first is a form of remote storage used as emergency backup by the ultrarich to circumvent the "real death" usually caused by the destruction of the cortical stack. The plot is, initially, driven by an investigation commissioned by someone attempting to find out what occurred between their last back-up and the time of their death. The second involves the duplication of a single pysche into two bodies, a highly difficult and illegal process. It is said to be much loved of a notoriously paranoid assassin named "Dimi the Twin", who uses this technique to provide trustworthy backup for himself. It is also used by the main character, Takeshi Kovacs, in the climactic events of the novel. While not provoking any existential angst in itself- both versions are, as digital copies, as "real" as the other — it does require one copy to be destroyed to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities, provoking a difficult discussion about which version has gained more "worthy memories" since the duplication. The dilema is eventually resolved by a game of rock, paper, scissors.
- The novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is realistic about artificial clones, treating them just like twins. This is amazing, since it was written in the 1930s. Then again, everybody is conceived artificially in the Brave New World, so why should clones have a stigma? (On the other hand, the techniques used to make the clones act the same are quite a stretch.)
- They technically were twins — none of the manipulation was genetic, and the technique essentially created a dozen sextuplets. Again, this was pretty damn visionary, since the purpose of DNA wouldn't even be discovered for 20 years.
- The Ira Levin novel The Boys From Brazil has Hitler clones that are just like identical twins — including the part about acting differently when they're raised in different environments.
- The Nazis who made the clones considered the nurture bit — all the clones are placed in families where the husband is much older than the wife, as was the case with Hitler's parents. To round things off, the adoptive fathers are killed when the clones have reached the age Hitler's father died.
- John Scalzi's Old Man's War trilogy features extensive cloning, though most of the time the clones are never brought to consciousness before having their progenitors' consciousness transferred. But The Ghost Brigades has an unusual example in which a clone develops consciousness overlaid with a failed attempt to transfer a progenitor's consciousness, causing internal conflicts.
- A series of sci-fi novels written by Steven L. Kent explores this trope. All enlisted men in the future armed forces (not officers or NCOs) are clones, and the main character is a special kind of clone. All the regular clones have no idea they're clones and are biologically programmed to die if they ever find out.
- The Regeneration book series by L. J. Singleton features five cloned teenagers who aged naturally. One of them was cloned from a serial killer and struggles with his violent urges, and all of them have some form of minor superpower.
- In the C.J. Cherryh novel Cyteen, much of the plot involves attempting to re-create a dead scientist by raising a clone much like the original - and there are many difficulties. But the bulk clone population is depicted as less than human, both in fact and in how society sees them. Critically, they are inherently vunerable to being programmed. Blues indeed: imagine having your emotional makeup determined by a committee comprising Microsoft and the Pentagon.
- Anna to the Infinite Power, a YA novel (and later movie), provides a thoughtful take on how the attempt to clone a single genius multiple times might be hampered by the distinctive personalities of her clones.
- A duology of novels, Farthest Star and Wall Around A Star by Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson, feature a form of teleportation that sends a copy of you elsewhere but leaves the original intact. The copy can be modified en route, since all you're transmitting is information. Interestingly, this is how most physicists figure real-life teleportation might work.
- The Finders Stone Trilogy by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb subverts that trope twice. When main heroine, Alias, who is herself an artificial, magically created being, found out that she has many clones, she is originally angry at being "copied"; the actual clones are much calmer, have their own lives, and don't mope about their origin in the slighest. Even more — the clones would like to be friends with Alias, are unaware of her, or don't care even if they do know. Two clones are seen in the series, a couple more are mentioned, and all of them are confident women with different personalities. Eventually, Alias accepts her "sister" as an equal and seems to be at ease with the whole deal.
- Gilbert Gosseyn (pronounced 'go sane' - get it?) of A.E. van Vogt's books The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A. When he's killed, he 'wakes up' in a new cloned body with all his old memories right up to his death. And he has a superpower too.
- In Accellerando and Glasshouse by Charles Stross, duplication of individuals is relatively common. Replicator-type devices are used, which results in perfect duplicates. Different "instances" of a person can be recombined in a process referred to as "merging deltas" (taken from real life software version control systems)
- In one particular inversion of this trope, one instance of a person returns to the solar system to find they have been made bankrupt by one instance of themselves, and are being sued by the children of another instance. The other clones are dead or missing, leaving them to take the rap... a person is explicitly "jointly and severally liable" for the actions of their other selves.
- Another curious incident has someone obviously unfamiliar with "running" multiple instances of themselves failing to realise that what they thought was one of their clones was actually someone else entirely using a copy of their body.
- The Beta clones get varying degrees of this in 7th Son once they discover what they are. In particular is Fr. Thomas, who fears that because he is artificial he has no eternal soul. Which is kind of a big deal for a priest.
- In Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox, the title character is a physical double of the original Jenna Fox who is almost entirely constructed of a substance called Bio Gel. Her exterior parts—like skin and hair—have been cloned from the original girl's cells. Even her brain is 90% artificial; it contains 10% of the brain of the original Jenna—the only portion of the original that could be saved.
- In John Varley's universe they have a law that only one person can own a genotype: all copies must be destroyed. So if you discover that you're an illegal clone, your only hope is to kill your progenitor and replace him/her. Cue several plots.
Live Action TV
- The rebooted Battlestar Galactica goes to town with this one with Cylon Number Eight (aka Sharon "Boomer" Valerii). While the other Eights are well-adjusted Cylons, Boomer is a sleeper agent and can't understand the crazy things that are happening to her, like waking up in a water tank with no idea of how she got there, or discovering multiple stolen explosives among her personal possessions. Interesting because all the identical Cylons are clones.
- Interestingly, the Cylons are never seen to make clones of existing human characters, rather they were based around certain archetypes of personality and appearance. All people revealed to be Cylons were that way from the beginning. They were either self-aware but passing for human or had fake memories. By the end, it is strongly implied that the Cylons would not even have known how to go about cloning an individual human; most of them didn't know how their own system of downloading functioned.
- As seen in Caprica, the first Cylons of the Twelve Colonies result from the controversial copying of human consciousness into robot bodies.
- At one point, even the apparently-revived Starbuck ponders whether or not she might be a clone with fake memories she's not.
- Doctor Who: "The Invisible Enemy" featured miniaturized clones of the Doctor and Leela, though K-9 explains that they aren't "really" clones, but a sort of phlebotinum-photocopy. Surprisingly, they gave no sign of having any trouble with their status as duplicates specifically created for a Fantastic Voyage, nor with the fact that their predicted lifespan was something on the order of twenty minutes.
- Subverted with Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter. She's a fraternal clone (cloning devices and Time Lords do not mix). She does get told she's "not real" by Donna and quickly calls her on it.
- Jenny was created by haploidisation, not by cloning. In haploidisation cells are split into haploids and then combined with another haploid to create a normal diploid cell. As such it is distinct from cloning as not all the genes present in the original cell will be present in the daughter cell (although fiction still often confuses the two).
- Played straight with Slime!Martha in "The Sontaran Strategy."
- Doctor 10.5 in Journey’s End. As a Biological Mashup he has a human lifespan with no regenerations. Not to mention that the original Doctor is angry at him for his Shooting The Dog actions. On the other hand, (no pun intended) he does finally get to snog Billie Piper, so this may be subverted.
- Subverted with The Master in The End Of Time. He does not seem to mind living with 6 billion copies of himself. In fact, they all seem to be very happy about it.
- Not to mention all the clones are quite content with their given jobs/ranks/clothes/etc — with the original being in charge — despite the fact that they are all equally qualified.
- Well, Timelords do share some sort of telepathic link (They can instantly recongnize each other), so its possible they viewed themselves as part of the same whole. It's possible he was just giving orders to himself for the sake of his massive ego.
- Sabrina The Teenage Witch: A sentient, mentally identical clone of Salem is casually destroyed magically by Hilda in the episode 'Thin Ice'; in the much earlier episode 'A Halloween Story' a magic spell creates a copy, but this double is essentially mindless and soon absorbed back into its creator.
- In Stargate Atlantis, the clone of a previously killed off character joins the team. He looks exactly like the old character and has the same personality and most of his memories. The catch? Without the regular injection of a special chemical, he'll eventually die because his cloned tissue can't regenerate fast enough to counter natural cell damage. Because of this, he was frozen in stasis until a cure could be found.
- However, after they note that it is not the real Beckett (and in a bit of Fridge Logic, even if it were, it would mean that a clone who was for all intents and purposes the same person had died!), they immediately forget this. This, despite the way they react to some copies of the team earlier that season. (Although these copies were made by Replicators, they were completely human themselves).
- Beckett was helped because his "original" was already dead. The Replicator-made clones of Weir, McKay, Ronon, and Sheppard had to deal with the fact their originals were alive, well, and staring them in the face (except for Weir).
- Stargate characters seem to have two default reactions to duplicates: (A) it's the same person in another body, or (B) it's a disposable fake. They never seem to consider (C) it's an identical twin sibling, which real clones are. "Disposable fake" is how the plot treats them - except in Carson's case, again proving the "so long as there's just one in the end" rule.
- Ba'al and his many clones on Stargate SG-1 have clones of both the host and the symbiote. They are completely indistinguishable, and they even set up a Xanatos Gambit by pretending that the clones are fighting against the "real" Ba'al, convincing SG-1 to capture every single one (with a string of puns). Then each one claims to be the real one.
- Also in Stargate SG-1, the entire Asgard race is a race of clones portrayed fairly realistically. They don't have magical "clone memories"; those need to be transferred via computer from the original body. (Thor undergoes this procedure almost as often as Daniel dies.) Also, the Asgard have been cloning themselves for so long that they have suffered severe genetic degradation and are no longer capable of reproducing in any way other than by cloning themselves.
- Ba'al likely used the Asgard cloning methods; he was Anubis's right-hand man for awhile, and Anubis had access to Asgard technology.
- They do mess up a bit at the end of Stargate: Continuum. After the final Ba'al clone is killed, his cloned host body seems to be a fully sentient being (Vala even goes over to comfort him), not just a slab of meat. While it makes sense that the Ba'al symbiotes would have clone memories (due to the Goa'uld's genetic memory), this should not apply to their cloned human hosts, who should be vegetables at the most (only the original Ba'al's original host body should have that person's memories, and the original Ba'al was apparently killed by Mitchell).
- There's plenty of precedent for a symbiote's memories being shared with the host, going as far back as Carter having bits and pieces of her Tok'ra symbiote's memories in season 2.
- Trouble is, if the host had no personality or memory to begin with, then he would be unable to resist the influence of the symbiote, and would thus be no more than a human version of Ba'al — ergo, they'd have to kill or imprison him.
- Perhaps he was never happy with his arrangement.
- As was mentioned in Stargate: Continuum, Ba'al went to great lengths to hide which one was the real him. On several occasions during the shows history, it has been shown it is possible to communicate with the host rather than the symbiote, so using the same Asgard technology to duplicate the hosts memories makes sense as a means of preventing an easy method of detecting the true Ba'al by suppressing the symbiote and talking to the host.
- Star Trek has probably provided more examples of the Cloning Blues than the entire rest of television, fiction, and comic books put together.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Jem'Hadar and Vorta fit the "really unlucky clones" described above to a T, including innate combat or tactical prowess and the inbred belief that their creators are gods.
- Mocked in one instance when Worf has the chance to kill one of his captors. He kills the one who is cloned all the time, and the Cardassians say he should have killed someone not as disposable.
- Star Trek The Next Generation had one odd defiance, however: on discovering a transporter-cloned version of Riker who was trapped on a planet for many years, the new and old version have an equal claim as the "original" and seem to avoid most of these issues. "Tom" Riker continues his career, then appears in Star Trek Deep Space Nine after he left Starfleet to join the Maquis.
- Star Trek often subverted the Cloning Blues by having the crew be unwilling to just kill the clones. However, the writers were quite willing to kill clones and often casually dispatched them in ways that would never happen to a regular character.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine specifically establishes that "killing your own clone is still murder," at least in the 24th century Federation.
- But note that, in Star Trek The Next Generation, "Up the Long Ladder" showed characters acting with astonishing callousness toward clones: When the ship comes upon a colony (after discovering and evacuating the rustic descendants of its crashed sister-ship) populated by the cloned descendants of five shipwreck survivors (the rest of the colony ship's crew died in the crash, leaving a gene pool too small to reproduce naturally), the colony says that their genes are starting to degrade so much that cloning won't work anymore and plead for genetic donations. Disgusted, the Enterprise's crew declares that no one onboard, nor anywhere in the Federation, will participate in such a practice. The colony then discreetly steals genetic samples of Riker and Doctor Pulaski. Upon figuring out what happened and discovering their clones being grown, both decide on the spot to single-handedly murder all of their not-yet-conscious clones with hand-phasers in cold blood. The Enterprise then forces the colony of clones (to whom the concepts of sexual intercourse and romance are repellent) to absorb and intermarry with the rustics from their evacuated sister colony (which is difficult with a 3-2 male-female population).
- Worthy of mention is how the crew found out that they had genetic material stolen — Pulaski scanned her stomach lining for missing cells because she suspected that they took a sample, and that's the best area to harvest them from. The stomach lining consists of epithelial cells and still sheds cells. The science fails.
- Well, it's just another reason why people tend to disregard the first two years of TNG when discussing the Federation, or TNG for that matter.
- In Voyager, not only are the crew delighted to give their genetic material to an alien entity whose motives are incomprehensible to our human minds, but they also allow themselves to be perfectly copied so that the clones can live out the rest of their sorry existence on a bizarre hellish planet with no way to escape.
- It's not bizarre and hellish to the "clones."
- It gets worse. The clones do eventually die a miserable, forgotten death when they accidentally destabilize themselves in an attempt to get home faster. They eventually rediscover that they're not the originals, with all the attendant angst. Then they rapidly fall apart and die, ultimately making a desperate attempt to have their accomplishments and existence remembered by the originals. Their efforts are brutally subverted, suggesting that the writers didn't want to admit that clones were worth being remembered.
- In V: The Series, a clone of Star Child Elizabeth is created by the invaders. She looks exactly like the original, but she doesn't talk and tends to eat humans. In the end, she's killed by an invader when she rushes him to save the life of the original Elizabeth and her boyfriend, Kyle.
- An episode of Farscape featured a villain who could make perfect copies of people and who lampshaded the common mistake by being mildly offended when someone referred to it as cloning. Unusually, the "twin" of John Crichton survived the episode. Neither of them tried to kill each other but, for the sake of sanity, the crew split into two groups, each with a copy. Also unusually, neither one was clearly established as the copy. (The scientist claimed both were "equal and original.") Savvy viewers probably guessed that the one who finally got together with Aeryn was the doomed one.
- While the copy of Crichton that ended up on Talyn may have been the doomed one, he was still not outed as a clone; this was driven home in his final message to the other John when they played Rock, Paper, Scissors one last time.
- To add some context, at the end of the initial episode, the two Johns play Rock, Paper, Scissors in an attempt to pick who was real and who was the clone (or something to that effect). Both kept picking the same thing, resulting in a long string of ties. The essential message of the final message was that the point was irrelevant; they both were real, and they both were individuals who had developed in different ways.
- Smallville had a clone in the episode "Accelerate". A clone of Lana's childhood friend developed by LuthorCorp had super-speed — and was completely insane.
- Smallville's version of Bizarro is for once not an "imperfect clone" of Clark. While originally a Phantom Zone Wraith, Bizarro creates a body out of Clark Kent's DNA, technically making his new body a clone of Clark's.
- Kyle and Jessie of Kyle XY are clones grown in a lab, but the cloning itself is realistic; they were grown at normal speed, not fast (spending a lifetime unconscious in tubes), and they don't have clone memories. The word "clone" is never used; but cloning is clearly described, and they look exactly like the originals from many years ago. (Now, the explanation of their intelligence and powers, on the other hand....)
- Strangely enough, the third season finale strongly suggests that neither are clones, but simply identical versions of their same-sex parents. It is even stated that an unseen character is Kyle's biological mother, who was never even hinted at before in the show.
- The egg had to come from somewhere. It might not be a strong connection, but it seems likely to have a large impact on somebody of Kyle's good nature.
- In the Outer Limits episode "Think Like a Dinosaur" (and the short story it is based on), the teleporter creates perfect duplicates of people at the destination. The catch is that it is the original who is now worthless — and destroyed. This sort of duplication/destruction teleportation turns up a lot in Sci-fi.
- An earlier Outer Limits example is the original series' "The Duplicate Man". Twenty Minutes Into The Future, an anthropologist illegally brings a Megasoid, a member of an intelligent but bloodthirsty alien race, to Earth. When the creature escapes, the cowardly anthropologist has himself "duplicated" so that his clone can secretly hunt the Megasoid. As in the episode's literary source (Clifford D. Simak's short story "Goodnight, Mr. James"), the clone unknowingly has a poison in his bloodstream that will kill him at a preset time. The Outer Limits version adds the twist that the anthropologist's dissatisfied wife is happier with the clone, since her real husband has become cold and distant. However, the Outer Limits version cops out of killing the protagonist by revealing that he's not the clone but the original.
- The revial series "Replica" had a scientist create a perfect duplicate of his (apparently) terminally comatose wife; the duplicate is completely unaware she is a clone until the original wakes up and is presented as an entirely sympathetic character in a subversion of this trope she even gets one of the few unambigously happy endings in the series; the scientist stays with his original wife but clones himself so that the cloned wife can stay with 'him'.
- Some genetically engineered X5 supersoldiers in Dark Angel have clones, who are treated (by the narrative) as identical twins with their own unique identities. But it still sucks to be them because Manticore (the evil organization that made the X5s) punished them for the escape of their originals. Alec has had a particularly rough time, because he's a clone of the serial killer Ben.
Music
- The Who's song "905" features a clone, who is presumably the 905th iteration of the line, lamenting his inability to do anything original whatsoever.
- Alic Cooper's "Clones (We're All)" (6 has similar problems to the Who's 905).
- "My Clone Sleeps Alone" by Pat Benatar. Her clone lives in a sterile sexless future.
- The Leo Kottke/Mike Gordon song "Clone" (from the album of the same name) has fun with this idea.
- The parody song "I Think I'm A Clone Now" by Weird Al Yankovic.
Radio
- The radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy featuers Lintilla... and Lintilla and Lintilla. Apparently there were some problems with a cloning machine which would be forming a new Lintilla while halfway building the previous one, so turning off the machine would be counted as murder. There was also Allitnil and his buddies Allitnil and Allitnil, who were Niallivs, sort of, sent by the same cloning corporation to eradicate all the Lintillas by "marriage" licences which were really agreements to stop existing, getting around the whole homicide aspect.
Tabletop Games
- The original Dungeons & Dragons included a spell called "Clone". It made a magical duplicate of someone, and when they became aware of each other's existence, each was filled with an unrelenting desire to kill the other. As of Third Edition, the "Clone" spell now just creates a lifeless copy of the user's body. It needs to be preserved somehow or it will rot (a relatively simple spell takes care of that), but if it is still intact when the original dies, they reincarnate in that body (though the clone does not gain any knowledge — i.e. experience or abilities — that the original gained since the clone was created). However a similar effect is preserved in the expensive item "Mirror of Opposition". It creates a temporary clone whose only purpose is to kill the original.
- In Paranoia, all PC's are clones, and on death are replaced with duplicate clones with the character's memories and personality. They have much reason to get the blues, repeated cloning can lead to personality quirks and full-blown psychoses. Oh, and being a mutant is treason — this leads to the situation of mutants executed by other clones for treason when discovered, but their replacement clone instantly arriving can't be executed again until it's proven to also be a mutant. Due to inherent problems with the cloning system, they may come back with a different mutation!
- Getting the Cloning Blue is Treason. (unless your Level Blue or higher of course)
- Averted in Star Drive, where the clone population of the Borealis Republic suffers no social stigma or unusual health problems.
- In Warhammer 40000 reproductive cloning is outlawed by the Adeptus Mechanicus (unless you are the Ad Mech, of course) due to certain ...bad experiences with the technology in the setting's pre-history. Given the nature of the "current" 40K universe, they must have been really bad. However, if you are a clone in this universe, it's OK because you probably won't be aware of this fact because you will have been created specifically so that you can have one or more of your limbs surgically replaced with crude-but-effective bionic augmentations and have your brain hard-wired with programming circuitry so that you can be used as a disposable assembly line robot/slave, or in order to be used as a growth-bed for reproducing the genetically engineered organs that are used to create the Space Marines, a painful procedure that usually amounts to vivisection, twice. Unless, of course, you were really unlucky and were created by the bad guys.
- There also is the Death Corp of Krieg, who are more or less just like the Star Wars clones only its more than one template (what was left after their civil war) they hide this by wearing Gas masks all the time. Maybe...
- In Changeling: the Lost, a 'clone' is left so the original won't be missed. This clone must be killed for the original to reclaim their place in the real world.
Video Games
Western Animation
- The DNA Delivery clones employed by Bedlam in Get Ed are so faulty that being hit hard enough (either by a board to the head or getting tossed out of a moving hovercraft at high speed) causes them to disolve into a puddle of goo (that can momentarily reform before splatting again) that, according to Loogie, tastes minty.
- Gargoyles has Thailog, who starts as a subversion of this trope. Thailog was cloned from Goliath's DNA and rapid-aged to match Goliath's age; however, unlike the stereotypical clone, he didn't share Goliath's memories or worldview. He was indoctrinated via subliminal messages into becoming a Machiavellian villain. He had no more real desire to destroy Goliath than is natural to villains. And the rapid-aging process was portrayed as having the side-effect of causing Thailog's coloration to be different from Goliath's. The characters consider Thailog Goliath's son, although "twin brother" would be more accurate.
- Later, Thailog and Demona work together to recover the other Manhattan Clan's DNA and then hand them over to Dr. Sevarius to make their own clones: Malibu (a clone of Brooklyn), Brentwood (clone of Lexington), Hollywood (clone of Broadway) and Burbank (clone of Hudson). They lack smarts, as they were programmed only to "obey Thailog". Without Demona's knowledge, Thailog also creates a clone from DNA merged between Demona and Elisa Maza named "Delilah" to act as his new partner to replace Demona; Demona is not happy when she finds this out. After Thailog and Demona are defeated, the clones join the Labyrinth Clan; but in the comics, they temporarily betray their clan to ally with Thailog. After Delilah helps them recover their senses, all but Brentwood return to the Labyrinth Clan (Brentwood prefers Thailog because "Thailog smart").
- In the ABC continuation, the clones turn to stone, apparently permanently, because of a malfunction in their cloned DNA. But, since this was the ABC continuation, it didn't happen.
- The Fairly Oddparents: Timmy has done this many times. He once remarked about it:
Norm the Genie: Well, there you go! So I whipped this little baby up to cover for you with them. Wanda: The ankles are filled with marshmallow! Cosmo: Ah, oh, oh no! It broke! Norm: And get ya out of school! (gongs a clone) Tada! Timmy: A clone? Been there, done that.
- Scourge of Transformers has the Sweeps, physical clones who are supposedly his huntsmen. However, they all have different voices and different personalities. As wary as Scourge is, the Sweeps are even worse. He occasionally has to ask Cyclonus for help ordering them around.
- Cyclonus was also supposed to have a clone "armada". One clone shows up in the movie when he is first created, but it is never seen again. This is the subject of much fan discussion.
- Transformers Animated has Starscream creating a squad of clones as his own personal army, each of the clones embodying an aspect of his personality. The problem is that it's Starscream's personality, making the clones an egomaniac, a pathological liar, a suckup, a total coward, and an opposite sex clone who's just plain insulting.
- In Superman the Animated Series, Bizarro is a clone of Superman created by Lex Luthor.
- This was parodied by The Simpsons in a Treehouse Of Horror episode. Homer's clones degraded as clones of clones of clones (etc.) were made; so much so that two featured clones were: Homer as he appeared & sounded in the original "Tracy Ullman Show" shorts, and Peter Griffin.
- Futurama gets this more or less right: Professor Farnsworth's clone looks like a younger version of him but has a completely different personality. The clone also has a deformity that the original doesn't have, a piglike nose from pressing against the glass of the cloning chamber.
- Also, in "Bender's Big Score," time travel clones have a high "doom factor" that causes them to be destroyed.
- In the second season WITCH episode "H is for Hunted", Nerissa produces an Altamere of Will — a living, breathing, feeling, thinking magical clone of her that retains all of Will's memories and friendships. Nerissa tells the Altamere that the only way it can have a real life is if it kills the original Will; otherwise, it will be absorbed back into the Heart of Kandrakar and obliterated forever. This leads to a vicious fight between Will and her Altamere, but once Will realizes her Altamere is a being with a soul, she refuses to fight it and accepts it as a friend... A few seconds later, it sacrifices itself to shield Will from one of Nerissa's attacks.
- Nerissa later makes an Altermere of Yan Lin, who survives and is introduced to Yan Lin's family as her long-lost twin sister Mira.
- In the Kim Possible episode "Kimitation Nation", Dr. Drakken creates an army of duplicates of Kim, Ron, and classmate Bonnie. When discussing it with Wade, she comments that cloning shouldn't work like that according to science class. He agrees; it's not "really" cloning, but they'll refer to it as such to simplify things. The clones were merely used in a Fantastic Aesop and killed off by soda.
- In Justice League Unlimited, Supergirl learns that the now-villainous Professor Hamilton took genetic samples of her to create a murderously sociopathic clone of Supergirl, named Galatea. However, Hamilton modified the clone to be an older version of Supergirl to make her tougher. Furthermore, Galatea is also a homage to the later copy of Supergirl, Power Girl, as noted by her white costume with a chest hole intended to show off her cleavage, as well as her more developed...musculature.
- In the third season of Transformers: Beast Wars, a clone of Dinobot is created who bears little resemblance to the original beyond his name, a similar-sounding voice, and having an alternate mode based on the same animal. (Thankfully, the aging issue can be tossed aside in this case... It doesn't apply to robots.) In an earlier season, Dinobot's biological form was cloned by the villains to serve as an infiltrator; Dinobot was implied to have eaten him, but he was an enemy, so it didn't matter that he was a copy.
- Parodied in the Season Two opener of The Venture Brothers.
- Although it is implicitly played straight. If Orpheus' trip to the nether in an attempt to resurrect the Venture Brothers is any indication, then Dr. Venture's cloning experiments rendered the Venture Brothers soulless casks of themselves, since Orpheus is unable to find their spirits therein.
- Their souls were located inside the learning machine; their souls just hadn't been transferred to their bodies yet.
- One episode of Care Bears has No Heart kick Mr. Beastly out for yet another infraction of common sense, which means that Shreeky is left to do all the menial labor normally left to her dimwitted partner. She eventually comes up with a way to get out of her unenviable situation: she creates five magical clones of herself, and introduces them all to No Heart. But when she gets to the one who's supposed to "take the blame for [making] messes", the Shreeky clones start bickering amongst themselves; then No Heart bellows that he'd rather have Beastly back than deal with them. After he leaves, Shreeky smugly expresses her satisfaction with the results of her apparent Xanatos Gambit; then the other Shreekies start bickering over who really came up with the idea...prompting the real Shreeky to say "there's only room for one Shreeky around here!" and casually disintegrate them all with her magic mirror.
- Danny Phantom gets the "Evil Clone Created To Destroy Me" - only the clone isn't evil, just manipulated by Vlad Plasmus. The clone is also a she (Dani Phantom).
- Time to watch Clone High. Their angst is entertaining.
- In Code Lyoko, William's phenominally stupid artificial clone, created through the supercomputer, has to replace him for several months. He never complains or angsts about his situation, probably because he doesn't realize what he is or accepts it without understanding it. It's the real William who suffers in this situation, as he comes back to find that the clone has completely trashed his reputation through stupidity.
- Many people may have forgotten, but the AndrAIa who appears in all episodes of ReBoot past her introduction is a backup copy of the original sprite who, unable to leave the game herself, piggybacked the copy onto Enzo because she didn't want him to be separated from her forever.
- Exo Squad featured clones of major NeoSapien generals and other characters. They tended to realize that they were clones, and one even stated that his predecessor had died on Venus. Given the tens of thousands, if not millions, of deaths that possibly occurred during the series, it is not exactly a case of Back From The Dead. Most never seemed to care about being clones; however, most were clones of genetically engineered humans.
- In Carl Squared, C2 has a significantly different personality from Carl. Of course, C2 also 5% DNA from car's dog Rex, which causes him to catch frisbees in his mouth and scratch behind his ear with his foot.
- Jim Gaffigan and Conan O'Brian's animated short series Pale Force has an episode where NBC president Jeff Zucker attempts to clone Conan several times, with several unintended side effects. One clone is a human fly, one is hideously mutated, and one even has breasts. The supposedly "perfect" clone, called "Clonan O'Brian" has a desire for human flesh.
- The Simpsons had a Hallowe'en episode where Homer had a cloning machine, where he was able to make loads of copies of himself. There was a bit of Take That to Family Guy when Peter Griffin turned up as one of the clones!
Web Comics
Web Original
- The idea of a stereotypical, perfect-copy clone is used in a fantastically original manner in the web-novel John Dies at the End. In this case the blues aren't about being a clone so much as they are that he killed the original main character and took his place without knowing. His best friend and girlfriend forgive him, but now his biggest worry is Villain Override.
- Cloning can be done fairly easily for people in the civilized regions of Orions Arm, memory transfer optional. This isn't commonly done, since property laws get all iffy when cloning comes into the picture: most of the time, the copies can own property but have no property to begin with. Other times, if the clone is given the original's memories, property can be split down the middle if a disagreement arises. It varies A LOT depending on region. Nonetheless, one person cloned himself hundreds of times and is in the process of making a documentary on the myriad ways his copies have gone. On the net or in virches (virtual environments), copying is done very frequently. These are not usually included in population counts for this reason.
- Belphoebe of the Whateley Universe was a forced-aging clone of Jobe's perfect drow girl, with no memories. Then a fat, neurotic nerdboy tried to copy a girl's mind into Belphoebe so he'd have someone who'd like him and accidentally copied his own mind in. It takes Belpheobe a while to get her act together at that point.
Real Life
- A totally different kind of Cloning Blues occurs in Real Life, with creatures that reproduce asexually — by dividing their cells into two, creating an identical clone. Studies have indicated that it's way easier for parasites to optimally adapt to a strain of creatures with identical DNA than to a species whose biology is based on the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction, and there's evidence that that might be the reason sexual reproduction evolved in the first place. (Go read Carl Zimmer's book Parasite Rex to find out more.)
- Most fruit bought in today's grocery stores are in fact clones, a practice much simpler than "cloning" depicted on TV and a practice that goes all the way back to ancient China — in essence it's an artificially induced botanical form of asexual reproduction.
- These clones are typically called Cultivars and are usually registered and well documented. For example, *all* "Grape Juice" is made from the Concord Grape (White grape juice is typically from the "Niagara Grape"). Every single Concord Grape vine is genetically identical to every other Concord Grape vine. For decades, these grapes have been cloned naturally by taking a cutting off one of their branches, shoving it in the ground, and waiting for roots to appear. Sometimes the growers get creative, using a cloned top of the plant and a cloned root system (called rootstock) stuck on for good measure — for plants that are really tasty or grow really well except for their roots.
- This is a common practice with fruit trees as well. In the Yakima Valley in Washington State, USA, where most of the country's apples are grown, it would be difficult to find an orchard tree whose seeds had the same genetics as its root cells.
- Pygmy Sundews, a type of Carnivorous Plant, take this one stage further. They grow a special type of growth called a "gemmae" — basically a seed without a shell. These gemmae, when ready, explode off the plant and land nearby, where they grow into a perfect clone of the original plant if the conditions are right. It makes growing hybrids very easy, as once you have a plant you like, you can simply wait and in the fall, it will clone itself a few dozen times over.
- Seedless grapes and domestic bananas are in fact no longer able to reproduce sexually, having adapted to being cloned by humans instead. Going back to the original point that spawned all this talk of cloned plants, one strain of banana was made completely extinct about a century ago due to a parasite that evolved to only feed on that strain. The most common variety of banana nowadays is at risk of the same fate. There are no reports of wild bananas having this trouble.
- The horror associated with this trope is a major reason why (fake) news of cloned humans gets people very excited, and many places have already passed laws making human cloning illegal.
- When they bother to make the distinction, it's reproductive cloning (artificial twinning) that is outlawed, while tissue cloning (for replacement organs and such) is not, as the potential is far too great to throw away.
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