Looking for Fantasy novels with clones?

Lois McMaster Bujold has several excellent ones--Ethan of Athos and The Mirror Game come to mind. Actually, every subsequent Vorkosigan book after Mirror Game features clones in some way, notably Brothers in Arms. I just love how she develops individual identity within clones and all of the environmental factors and experiences that make them into very different people.

Note that the Bujold books mentioned are not, technically, fantasy. They are marketed as SF, feature standard SF tropes like space ships & human-colonized planets in distant solar systems, and the clones are made by Science, not magic. There is no magic involved in the books at all (except in the Clarkeian sense that sufficiently advanced science looks like magic).

I can't think off-hand of any fantasy clones to recommend. Since clones actually exist and are conceptually part of the scientific domain, fiction that involves clones qua clones is almost by definition going to be science fiction, not fantasy. For the fantasy equivalent you may need to redefine what you're looking for. (For instance, some variation on a golem or a changeling might look enough like a clone for what you want. Or magic gone amok, as in the Sorceror's Apprentice)

Technically identical twins could be called clones; twins are rife in fantasy and in myth. That might be useful in searching.

Came here to recommend Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and then realised you wanted recs in the fantasy mileau. The book's a terrific read, just not what you asked for. D'oh!

litdawg said:

Lois McMaster Bujold has several excellent ones--Ethan of Athos and The Mirror Game come to mind. Actually, every subsequent Vorkosigan book after Mirror Game features clones in some way, notably Brothers in Arms. I just love how she develops individual identity within clones and all of the environmental factors and experiences that make them into very different people.

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Ethan of Athos doesn't have any clones, IIRC. It does have genetically engineered people and lots of babies gestated in uterine replicators.

Mark, the clone in Mirror Dance and subsequent novels, was cloned in a petri dish and gestated in a uterine replicator. There's no magic in Bujold's Vorkosigan books and no clones in her fantasy books. But she is a fantastic writer, so reading her books is not a waste of time!

There was David Brin's Glory Season, though this was a SF novel. The biological premise was a population of humans who had a similar reproductive mechanism as is found in some species of lizard--with females being able to clone themselves or reproduce sexually under certain conditions. Still, it had many of the story elements one finds in a fantasy novel.

There was also a novel by the same author called Kiln People. Again, it looks like it was more of a SF premise, though the idea was people could create clay golem replicas of themselves.

I don't know that I can think offhand of purely fantasy novels that have cloning as a premise, which is odd when you think about it, outside of occasional doppleganger situations, given that one can conceive of many non scientific or magical ways one could control reproduction to create clones or replicas of themselves or of certain people. It's a useful element for exploring questions of identity, personhood, and gender dynamics or alternative family structures.

Yeah, in fantasy you'd be looking for doppelgangers, maybe shapeshifters or mimics or shades, not clones. I can't think offhand of a fantasy book where that was the core premise, though they do appear as subplots; IIRC, there was one in Elizabeth Haydon's Rhapsody, and the tail end of E. Rose Sabine's A School for Sorcery has mirror-created "clones."

Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen has the feel of a fantasy, but is SF at its heart, and features an evil queen attempting to clone herself to extend her rule.

ETA - May have one! Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark features a magic that allows users to call a "shadow self", sort of a double/reflection... not sure if that counts?

BLAlley said:

The problem is that clones are a product of genetic science. Have you searched for fantasy books featuring doppelgangers or avatars?

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Avatars are embodiments of gods walking around, aren't they? Or mortals under control of a god or divine entity? Doppelgangers are creatures that take on the appearance of a particular human, not really two or more different humans who just so happen to be identical. Though I suppose either of these concepts could be manipulated to be along the same lines as clones.

There are certainly a lot of stories involving identical twins in different genres, including fantasy. Identical twins are clones of one another. Of course in a fantasy set in a pre-industrial world, they likely (unless a speculative element is present that informs their knowledge) wouldn't have anything like a modern understanding of genetics, or even the mechanism by which identical twins are born, but that hasn't stopped people from being fascinated with identical twins and all the implications they pose. It seems like it should be possible for someone to come up with a fantasy premise where someone, through magic or some other means, creates people who look and act very much alike. It would be a stretch for people in a pre-industrial fantasy world call them clones (a term that only dates back to the early 20th century and was originally applied to plants), but another word could be used instead.