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Adam's Stepsons
Dr. Johann Heimann designed the perfect soldiers: superhuman in strength and intelligence, immune to sickness and disease, programmed to lead the United Americas to a quick victory in the Mars Colony War. But Heimann didn’t anticipate the military’s unrealistic demands, or his own emotional responses to his creations. And now Number Six is calling him “Father”! What exactly is going on during the clones’ personality imprinting cycle?
As Heimann starts his investigation, Number Six grows in confidence and self-awareness…and both discover the project hides a secret even Heimann, himself, doesn’t suspect…
As Heimann starts his investigation, Number Six grows in confidence and self-awareness…and both discover the project hides a secret even Heimann, himself, doesn’t suspect…
- GenresScience Fiction
84 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 15, 2017
About the author
M. Thomas Apple
6 books58 followersLong ago, I gave up my high school dreams of becoming the next Carl Sagan and instead wound up working (in order) at a video rental store, a used bookstore, a computer seller, Kinko's, a Jewish newspaper company, and an HR firm. I eventually became a teacher of intercultural communication in Kyoto, where I vainly attempt to apply quantum mechanics to language teaching, practice martial arts and Zen Buddhism, and always keep one eye on the sky.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 1, 2017
A Goodreads Win
Adam's Stepsons by M.Thomas Apple
A short thought provoking science fiction story with a twist that I didn't see coming.
I did enjoyed reading this but found parts of it confusing & sort of felt that bits were missing. This story really got me thinking & little bits of it kept coming back to me all day. A very imaginative read.
Adam's Stepsons by M.Thomas Apple
A short thought provoking science fiction story with a twist that I didn't see coming.
I did enjoyed reading this but found parts of it confusing & sort of felt that bits were missing. This story really got me thinking & little bits of it kept coming back to me all day. A very imaginative read.
April 16, 2017
M. Thomas Apple’s tale of a terraformed Moon and war on Mars could have tracked any one of the well-worn paths of imagined worlds where advanced cloning and memory implantation are used to produce super-human soldiers. In the deft hands of the author, however, the idea is taken down a new and thought-provoking path in Adam's Stepsons as he infuses a refreshing dose of humanity into the popular theme. And, as with any good shorter piece, a revelation at the end makes you glad you carried through to the finale.
December 29, 2017
This quick read will latch on and not let you go. With lots of this technology coming online, this look into a dystopian future, complete with corporate bureaucracy, a scientist mourning the loss of a son, and a deal with the devil, hits all the notes just the right way. You will never expect the ending.
July 5, 2017
This is a fairly short novella on the subject of cloning, which explores the issue of what it is to have legal status as a human versus status as an exactly matching cloned human. Despite it being limited in scope and having a kind of brutal architecture in which lives are lived, the story explores interesting concept debates such as whether inherited memory from a donor is possible in a biological copy over-printed with identical neural patterns and what we should do if it was, i.e. bestow human rights? Could memory transfer as well, if pictures in your memory are formed from the configuration of cells and that configuration has been exactly re-created?
The story is set in the R&D facility of a losing side in a future inter-human conflict who have invested in cloning pilot warriors as a last resort. The drawback of building thinking creatures is that they do think and may opt out of the programme, especially if it transparently involves sacrificing themselves for someone else’s cause. In the immortal words of The Bride of Dracula, sod that.
If a clone is an exact copy of a human, down to each strand of DNA and the position of every cell, is it alive? Yes, obviously, but the spark of life has been carried across biologically from the host (not created chemically), so that’s pretty hard to have rights over. It’s like patenting a leg just because you’ve received a live replacement.
What is a clone? It is the same as the donor but not occupying the same position in space and time. Okay, stage 2, so what if the donor dies? That person is legally dead and it cannot be both alive and dead at the same time, so can this argument in law be used to deny the clone legal status and human rights? Although, when an amoeba buds off, aren’t these separate animals with the same status? Denial of human status and rights is certainly useful if you want to use it as an expendable plastic soldier but not granting this parity is surely manipulating the rules to make sure everything serves us. How cosy. If so, what would happen if the clones had free will and outnumbered the humans, so felt it was time to change the balance of the system? Would we be left disenfranchised instead and deserve to be? It might be better to agree they are the same as us and then we will have common goals that advantage all sapient bipeds.
If a clone made by human ingenuity matches us materially, it’s a fake. If it also has thoughts, feelings, memories, empathy and tells jokes, our ability to ignore its rights and use it like a tool takes on a certain ethical fragility and we could be accused of slavery. Is there any moral value in pursuing this? When a copy becomes too much like the original, it becomes indivisible by any test except its birth certificate, so the law has to change to accommodate it… them… us.
The book doesn’t really speculate on the solutions to these questions and kind of drifts off at the end with the usual explanation of identities and shoot-up scene (the answer to everything), so it was alright in its conflicting moralities and worth reading but fell short of a fully satisfying exploration of this sci-fi concept and that’s probably because it finished too soon for the reader to care about the fate of the characters and their tarnished souls seeking for reason.
The story is set in the R&D facility of a losing side in a future inter-human conflict who have invested in cloning pilot warriors as a last resort. The drawback of building thinking creatures is that they do think and may opt out of the programme, especially if it transparently involves sacrificing themselves for someone else’s cause. In the immortal words of The Bride of Dracula, sod that.
If a clone is an exact copy of a human, down to each strand of DNA and the position of every cell, is it alive? Yes, obviously, but the spark of life has been carried across biologically from the host (not created chemically), so that’s pretty hard to have rights over. It’s like patenting a leg just because you’ve received a live replacement.
What is a clone? It is the same as the donor but not occupying the same position in space and time. Okay, stage 2, so what if the donor dies? That person is legally dead and it cannot be both alive and dead at the same time, so can this argument in law be used to deny the clone legal status and human rights? Although, when an amoeba buds off, aren’t these separate animals with the same status? Denial of human status and rights is certainly useful if you want to use it as an expendable plastic soldier but not granting this parity is surely manipulating the rules to make sure everything serves us. How cosy. If so, what would happen if the clones had free will and outnumbered the humans, so felt it was time to change the balance of the system? Would we be left disenfranchised instead and deserve to be? It might be better to agree they are the same as us and then we will have common goals that advantage all sapient bipeds.
If a clone made by human ingenuity matches us materially, it’s a fake. If it also has thoughts, feelings, memories, empathy and tells jokes, our ability to ignore its rights and use it like a tool takes on a certain ethical fragility and we could be accused of slavery. Is there any moral value in pursuing this? When a copy becomes too much like the original, it becomes indivisible by any test except its birth certificate, so the law has to change to accommodate it… them… us.
The book doesn’t really speculate on the solutions to these questions and kind of drifts off at the end with the usual explanation of identities and shoot-up scene (the answer to everything), so it was alright in its conflicting moralities and worth reading but fell short of a fully satisfying exploration of this sci-fi concept and that’s probably because it finished too soon for the reader to care about the fate of the characters and their tarnished souls seeking for reason.
August 11, 2017
Dr. Heimann wrote a theoretical paper on the topic of cloning. He didn’t expect a desperate military to snap it – and him – up, and throw billions at him to make it happen. Severely conflicted, not least by the experiment’s choice of genetic donor, Dr. Heimann finds himself torn at every turn; most of all between what he knows is right and his orders. By the time he’s finally forced to face the fact that neither his reactions nor the clones’ behaviour can be defined as within the parameters of the experiment, it may be too late.
Adam’s Stepsons explores the hot topic of human cloning; their development, their status, and the more ephemeral topic of whether the ability to think is the basis of individuality. I found that the characters and the plot were well-developed, with a fast-paced storyline. The aspect I found a little weaker was the world building. As a reader, you’re aware there is a war and the clones are being developed to fight in it, but basically world awareness is limited to the lab, the military base beside it, and scattered memories from a couple of the characters. If the story were being told uniquely from a clone’s perspective, that would have been a brilliant tactic; as a lot of the story is from Dr. Heimann’s point of view, it came across as rather odd. Kudos, however, for a great final plot twist.
Reviewed for By Rite of Word.
Adam’s Stepsons explores the hot topic of human cloning; their development, their status, and the more ephemeral topic of whether the ability to think is the basis of individuality. I found that the characters and the plot were well-developed, with a fast-paced storyline. The aspect I found a little weaker was the world building. As a reader, you’re aware there is a war and the clones are being developed to fight in it, but basically world awareness is limited to the lab, the military base beside it, and scattered memories from a couple of the characters. If the story were being told uniquely from a clone’s perspective, that would have been a brilliant tactic; as a lot of the story is from Dr. Heimann’s point of view, it came across as rather odd. Kudos, however, for a great final plot twist.
Reviewed for By Rite of Word.
April 17, 2021
I liked it.
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October 2, 2017AUTHOR UPDATE:
Adam's Stepsons has just won Honorable Mention in the 2017 Readers' Favorite Book of the Year Award, in the category of Best Short Story / Novella.
https://readersfavorite.com/2017-awar...
Adam's Stepsons has just won Honorable Mention in the 2017 Readers' Favorite Book of the Year Award, in the category of Best Short Story / Novella.
https://readersfavorite.com/2017-awar...
Read
October 5, 2017AUTHOR UPDATE
Adam's Stepsons was selected as a BookWorks Featured Author selection (https://www.bookworks.com/book/adams-...).
It also garnered an Honorable Mention Award in the 2017 Readers' Favorites Award Contest (Short Story / Novella) (https://readersfavorite.com/2017-awar...).
Adam's Stepsons was selected as a BookWorks Featured Author selection (https://www.bookworks.com/book/adams-...).
It also garnered an Honorable Mention Award in the 2017 Readers' Favorites Award Contest (Short Story / Novella) (https://readersfavorite.com/2017-awar...).
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews