Reply To: Hobby Weekender 17/08/18

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1. Cloning does pose some ethical questions, not least how there is nowhere to perfect the process without creating living creatures to gauge how the process affects their life expectancy. Beyond that you get into issues of what cloning is for. if you can clone meat in a lab without putting an intelligence to it, does that render the killing of animals for food moot? What are the risks to a society of clones if dangerous defects – biological or mental – arise but are identified too late for any remedy? if you clone a person are they property or a being in their own right? If the process is intended to extend an individuals lifespan, then how do you gauge that they are still the same person they were originally? Or will it be moot as any society advanced enough to have readily available cloning techniques available would be presumed to have already answered these questions? I’ve read a few different takes on this subject over he years in various fictional mediums, but highlights have been the works of; Peter F Hamilton, especially his Commonwealth books where keeping an updated backup of your mind is  literally an after thought so death is to many an abstract; Alistair Reynolds, whose most bold use for cloning might be the off-the cuff use of it in The House of Suns where the idle rich of Old Earth cloned themselves to create massive, extended families of still distinct identities to adventure out into the depths of space and explore the eons to come,each  “line” finding it’s own specialty; Star Wars, especially The Clone Wars which examined the ethical realities of having a clone army of sentients created to fight your Republics wars for you; Knights of Sidonia,where aboard one of humanities last great arks a devastating accident forced the use of cloning to create something resembling a diverse genetic pool to carry on the species, but not without some tinkering to make these new citizens better adapted to a life in space; Marvel’s X-23/The All-new Wolverine, Laura Kinney, the clone of Wolverine, created to be an assassin, who herself was cloned  to create weapons of a similar caliber if a bit more pliable. The journey Marvel have taken her on, and her sister Gabby, has been one of the best long-form arcs Marvel have committed to. I could name more but those are just a flavour…
2. Archaeologically speaking right at this moment we are living at the slimmest wedge of human knowledge, despite having reached one of the highest levels of technical ability. We literally live in a world surrounded by ancient relics that some of our finest minds have  spent careers trying to understand the construction and function of – Stonehenge, and the Pyramids for example. if you want to get REALLY prosaic about it, then human history is effectively invisible prior to the end of the last Ice Age, and there were several global freezes that preceded that. given how thoroughly the implacable glaciers carve through the land, leaving no trace of what came before in there wake, who can say if there were civilizations that came before the ones we know, of which nothing now remains but echoes of racial memory? It’s a tantalizing thought, and your mileage may vary as to the probability of them having existed.
3. A game I’ve wanted but never gotten around to buying. hmm, that’s a toughy. There is one PS2 game I’ve never gotten around to picking up, mainly as it’s release was so limited if you want a copy now Ebay prices start at £50 and only go up from there (one enterprising soul wants £200 for a copy :O  ). it’s name was God Hand, and why is this game so pricey? Well the studio that created it (Studio Clover) were responsible for Okami and both Viewtiful Joe titles for Capcom, serving as an R&D studio for them, and Godhand was their last game before the studio was closed. Subsequently a good chunk of the staff of Clover formed or were hired by Platinum Games, creators of the likes of Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising; Revengence, Transformers Devastation and Nier: Automata. God Hand was an irrelevantly funny-yet-punishing beat’em up in it’s own right, but it’s dna is sown deep into the games that followed from Platinum making it a fascinating piece of videogame history that will only get more expensive as physical copies become more scarce & no sign of a digital release seems likely.

No real pledge as work and riding herd on my niece & nephew have pretty much wiped me out. I might see if I can’t get some more Space Wolves  built though over the weekend, maybe bodge together a Catachan Kill-Team out of some of the kits I have lying around….