The Possibility of an Island

4 ideas

1. Daniel's clones read his life story

   Daniel1, a wealthy, cynical French comedian who is aging and losing his youthful lover Esther, joins the Elohimite sect, a cult modeled on the Raëlians, whose members submit their DNA and a written life story so they can be cloned after death. Two thousand years later his clones, Daniel24 and Daniel25, live alone in sealed compounds on a depopulated Earth, read his account, and add their own commentaries. They find that his desire and suffering are almost impossible for them to understand.

2. Desire without youth becomes pure suffering

   In a society that ranks sexual desirability above almost everything else, aging does more than reduce pleasure. It turns the desire that remains into steady humiliation, because the wanting continues after the power to be wanted has gone. Old age becomes a state of exclusion from the only market that counts, and that is why promises of a renewed young body are so appealing.

3. Immortality through serial cloning and memoir

   The cult offers continuity of identity through two things: a genetic copy of the body and a written life story that each successor must study. The result is a lineage of near-identical beings linked by a text, not one self that lasts. Each clone inherits the story of a life it never lived, which exposes the gap between remembering a life and actually living it.

4. Eliminating suffering also eliminates meaning

   The neohumans have removed sexual desire, strong emotion and social contact in order to escape the pain their human predecessors felt. Seen through them, the capacity for suffering and the capacity for joy, attachment and meaning turn out to be the same capacity. A life engineered to be serene becomes empty, and the clones end up feeling a faint envy for the tormented human they were designed to improve on.

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