Mirror, Mirror, The Writing's on the Wall

Do you love staring at yourself in the mirror? What do you really see? Just your reflection? To see whether the clothes make the person? Or are you admiring your body? There are things about yourself beyond outward appearances which only you notice, tiny details that the rest of the world will miss without realizing. Only Dr. Jekyll can behold the ugliness of Mr. Hyde when he faces a mirror.

When I am in a reflective mood, I see a boy whose favorite genre has been science fiction ever since he can remember. From the point of view of a child, the subject matter in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) was just as serious as in Small Wonder (1985-89). But no one else knows that about me, so please don't tell anyone.

The themes of space exploration and robotics in those television shows present unknown variables that put the protagonists to the test, which translates into actions that can be considered heroic or diabolical by the rest of the world.

It is, however, another aspect of science fiction which began to emerge in TV shows, or revisited in the case of comic books, around the same time that gives the average protagonist an opportunity to judge himself / herself despite the world's opinions.

Raise your hands if you remember Bizarro. Yes? No?

For those of you who are new to comic books, Bizarro is an imperfect, albino-like replica of Superman. Created in the late 1950s, the antagonist had made a comeback in The Man of Steel (1986) limited series. Another version appeared eight years later.

So from space exploration to robotics, we now reflect on cloning. You will lose count of the number of stories born out of this subspecies of the science fiction genre. Yet in the case of Superman, I can't help but wonder... why was Superman's clone less than perfect?

Comic-book fans know that Superman can see through walls, listen to sounds from great distances, fly around the world faster than a jet, and use his incredible strength to save helpless civilians or battle superhuman combatants. But the icing on the cake is his charisma. Subtract that last element, and you have a powerful being - Bizarro - subjected to worldwide alienation. Add the fact that he was not raised by kindly farmers - you have a creature without a moral backbone. His symptoms get multiplied in the absence of a social circle which can only be created by maintaining a job the way Superman does in the role of Clark Kent. As terrible as Bizarro's actions may seem to the world, it will divide them when it comes to evaluating the more heroic Superman, because what happens on the day their savior loses his sanity? This looks like a question for Superman, too.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we welcomed the arrival of Dolly the cloned sheep. I can never forget the cover on The Week magazine which featured one of the creators (Dr. Ian Wilmut) and his creation (Dolly). Phrases including 'playing God' were being liberally thrown around in those days.

This scientific development coincided with the time I experimented with writing ... so, like many authors of the science fiction genre, I wound up contributing a clone-themed story to Shaktimaan, a popular TV series of the late 1990s. Unlike my predecessors in the West who had crafted scientific approaches for heroes like Superman to combat their doppelgangers with, I explored the possibility of Shaktimaan resorting to both his spiritual guru and a brilliant scientist to help vanquish the malevolent version of himself.

To understand the inner workings of the Indian superhero, Shaktimaan's body is powered by the five elements - Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and Sky - which had been activated by the awakening of the kundalini. In contrast, his vicious duplicate draws negative energy from the six passions - Lust, Anger, Greed, Attachments, Pride and Envy. It is anyone's guess which of the two power sources would get depleted in a battle, but why should I have all the fun of narrating how the final confrontation between man and clone went down?

As the years passed, I felt I was not done with my take on cloning. I tried weaving a tale for my own comic-book experiments, but it was not until my last year in high school that I got a chance to truly discover another, more thought-provoking possibility.

The whole story, including the title Jeremiah's Staff, appeared in my dreams. Bearing in mind that surrogacy presents both practicality and social stigma in the Indian context, I penned the fable using cloning as a symbolic device.

So no two tales of cloning can be completely alike. For Superman, the clone had to be robbed of charisma. In Shaktimaan, his duplicate is what a black magician is to a realized yogi. What else was John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) doing other than turning trustworthy colleagues into murderous strangers, all in the name of survival? Jurassic Park's dinosaurs have frog DNA, which lets them find a way to survive in the modern world.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, author Michael Crichton had to publish a clone of his first dino-book, while filmmaker Steven Spielberg and his successor had to clone the original 1994 masterpiece cinematic adaptation a few times. All of those attempts have had mixed results.

Polarizing the characters in the fictional universe, or readers in the real world, seems to be the primary purpose of cloning in storytelling. And if a consensus is never reached thereafter, there is no outcome other than extinction.

On this note, I'd like to present yet another question. What was so vile about Frankenstein's monster? The movies suggest that the creator had raised a dead man to life, but the book does not indicate as such. Was the creature an imperfect clone, too? Whatever the secret may have been, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has taken it to her grave.