The Bradbury Report »

Steven Polansky’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Glimmer Train, New England Review, and elsewhere. His short-story collection, Dating Miss Universe, won the Sandstone Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. He lives with this wife and daughter in Wisconsin.

The year is 2071. It is a world very recognizable to our own, only now the United States has implemented a wide-scale, government-run cloning program that is tied directly to health insurance. Each U.S. citizen has a "copy" living separately in a cleared zone in the Midwest. If an "original" is sick or injured and requires surgery, whatever he or she needs is taken from their clone. In the two decades since the program's inception, no person outside the government has ever seen their copy or been inside the Clearances, and no clone has ever successfully escaped—until now. The Bradbury Report is a fascinating meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of as a race and society. It is a powerful work of speculative fiction, beautifully written, about love, identity, free will, aging, and intelligence that will linger with you long after reading.

Publishers Weekly

Polansky's debut features well-developed characters and strong writing, but the science is simplistic and the moral of the tale is pounded home with a hammer. In 2071, most Americans routinely use their cloned “copies” for spare parts, never thinking of them as human. Retired teacher Raymond Bradbury is contacted by his ex-girlfriend Anna, who has joined the anti-cloning underground. For the first time this group has rescued a clone from a heavily guarded government compound; by chance, it's Ray's. Anna enlists Ray to turn the copy, whom they name Alan, into an anti-cloning spokesman. As the three hide in Canada, they begin to doubt the motives of Anna's compatriots. The contrived setting will hold little appeal to genre fans familiar with Kazuo Ishiguro's superior Never Let Me Go and other, more nuanced examinations of this morally and scientifically fraught topic. (May)