BODIES

In Mikheyev’s novel, a teenage inventor clones his murder victim and opens the floodgates for a secretive cloning industry with calamitous consequences.

This often gory tale centers mainly on the gifted pupils and alumni of upscale Middlebrooks high school in Los Angeles. In 2031, Vince Nilsson, one of its students, is the son of one of the richest men on Earth due to his heavy investment in Ethereum, which is the world’s most successful cryptocurrency in this version of the future. The teen is a science enthusiast whose main emotional connection is to his classmate Melissa Price. After she tells him that she doesn’t want to continue dating him, he creeps up to her bedroom window and shoots her dead along with her friend Ashley Carr. Using his wealth and dark-web connections, he manages to perfect human cloning in a lab in his family’s mansion, and he creates clones of both girls. It isn’t long before the new Melissa tries to kill him after having sex with him, as it turns out that the clones eventually recall all of the original person’s memories. He ends up murdering clone after clone during his many experiments, which lay the foundation for Vince’s new company, Emergence, where he is ultimately consumed by guilt and paranoia. A generation later, cloning continues on, which sparks a second Civil War; this time around, it’s the conservative South that disapproves of making property out of people. Nonetheless, cloning thrives as an underground industry, as dissatisfied spouses slay and replace unwanted husbands and bereaved parents create new versions of deceased children. By 2049, there’s a conspiracy to replace politicians and power brokers with clones worldwide.

Although Mikheyev name-checks Quentin Tarantino early on, it would be a little hasty to classify the material as tongue-in-cheek splatterpunk. The moments of ultraviolence instead set a nihilistic tone, especially in a late subplot when a few Middlebrooks misfits plan a massacre of popular kids in school. In an author’s note, Mikheyev calls the book “a kind of catharsis,” with story essentials coming to him in a dream. The latter quality may or may not explain such peculiar characters as a fire-scarred former pastor and a White House adviser with a pet bear who serves as a sort of voice of reason, conscience, and morality—when he isn’t taking a life himself. The author also states that he was particularly inspired by an Anthony Burgess quote about marriage (“To destroy, wantonly, such a relationship, is like destroying a whole civilization”); the author’s critique of discarded relationships has a real body count to match this metaphorical one as he tries to convey the fruitlessness of striving for relationship perfection. In the process, though, some of the wider SF–speculation aspects, including characters’ telepathy, unsatisfyingly recede into the background; indeed, an entire Civil War happens offstage with no useful details offered, and the fate of the clone empire remains ambiguous in favor of a more muted ending.

An odd, underdeveloped, and highly graphic tale of an attack of the clones.