In the Spirit of Aldous Huxley?
Kazuo Ishiguro has written a new novel: Never Let Me Go. Slate provides a compelling review of this eerie and chilly novel about cloned children. Based on the review, let's hope this novel resonates as loudly with us as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle did one hundred years ago. LINK. Excerpt:
In fact, [the] Hailsham [Institution] exists to raise cloned children who have been brought into the world for the sole purpose of providing organs to other, "normal" people. They don't have parents. They can't have children. Once they graduate, they will go through a period of being "carers" to others of their kind who are already being deprived of their organs; then they will undergo up to four "donations" themselves, until they "complete." (None of these terms has originated with Ishiguro; he just gives them an extra twist.) The whole enterprise, like most human enterprises of dubious morality, is wrapped in euphemism and shadow: The outer world wants these children to exist because it's greedy for the benefits they can confer, but it doesn't wish to look head-on at what is happening. We assume–though it's never stated–that whatever objections might have been raised to such a scheme have already been overcome: By now the rules are in place and the situation is taken for granted–as slavery was once–by beneficiaries and victims alike.
