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Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (Random House: New York, 1972). Ira Levin, The Boys From Brazil (Random House: New York, 1976). Review by Tom W. Miller |
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Fiction has heavily influenced popular distaste for human cloning. No novelist has had a greater impact than Ira Levin with his wonderful books, The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil. Joanna, the main character in The Stepford Wives and a modern, liberated woman, is disturbed by the female submissiveness she sees when her family moves to Stepford from the city. While husbands spend their evenings partying at the local Men's Association, the wives-their breasts full and their makeup immaculate-wax floors and generally act the ideal television housewife. Joanna finds a couple like-minded friends, and together, they try to organize the Stepford women, but to no avail. Instead, Joanna's friends, one by one, fall prey to the mysterious condition that has affected the other Stepford Wives. Joanna finally discovers the shocking truth-the technologically gifted husbands are replacing their flesh and blood mates with perfect and slavish robotic replicas. Levin devises an equally chilling plot for The Boys From Brazil. Yakov Liebermann, Nazi hunter, receives a late night call from Barry Koehler, a young devotee who has secretly taped a Nazi meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele has just sent out former SS members to kill ninety-four civil servants, all age sixty-five. When Koehler disappears, Liebermann begins to investigate. He convinces a friend at Reuters to cull "accidental" death reports for men who fit the profile. When Liebermann follows these leads, he can find no reason why the Nazis would want to kill these men. He does, however, discover a puzzling link between these cases-the dead men all had much younger wives and thirteen-year-old artistic sons with blue eyes and sharp noses. Eventually, a biologist puts it all together for Liebermann. Mengele has cloned Adolf Hitler and is trying to recreate the same environmental circumstances that produced the Nazi leader. Because Hitler's father died when he was sixty-five, so must the fathers of these boys from Brazil. It is a tribute to Ira Levin's efficient writing and absorbing plots that these books have become part of the popular lexicon and influenced attitudes about a future with human cloning. Some opponents of human cloning fear that clones will be Stepford wives-docile human chattel. Other people fear the maniacal plans that egotistic dictators might have for human cloning. Yet a careful reading of Levin's fiction should calm, rather than inflame, these fears. The Stepford wives are machines, rather than flesh and blood human clones. Even if a dictator could clone himself, the clone would be a unique individual, subject to a multitude of different environmental stimuli that would likely render him harmless. Moreover, in the latter case, the evil would lie with people like Mengele, not the clone or the technology itself. All lovers of fiction should read Ira Levin's novels-not because they shed light on an actual future with human cloning, but because they are gripping and well-told tales. |
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