Art & Culture: How to Defeat Your Own Clone by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry D. Johnson

One of the things I like best about being January Magazine’s art and culture editor is keeping my ear to the ground for emerging trends. For example, in the late 1990s, we were seeing a lot of books that sounded as though the authors had written them with their hands on their hips (if such a feat were physically possible). A decade on and we are seeing a new but somewhat similar trend: books that sound as though the authors had written them with their tongues firmly wedged in their cheeks.

While the difference between those things might seem subtle, it’s actually not really. Hands on hips books were laughing at themselves and the world at large while the tongue in cheek ones are a flight of fancy told in a way that makes them sound plausible, or even likely. Except that they’re not.

A good example of that is How to Defeat Your Own Clone (Bantam) by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry D. Johnson, a book based on the premise that you will require special skills to survive the biotech revolution. Except it’s funny. Only it’s kind of not.

Written by a couple of actual and for-real bioengineers, How to Defeat Your Own Clone is fascinating reading. Even when they play it for laughs, a message is being brought home. Here is what your future may look like, they seem to be saying at times and though the tone is often playful, they manage to pack a wallop of a message into this very slender paperback volume. As Kurpinski has said, “While many books have already been published on cloning and genetic manipulation, half seem to be textbooks and the other half are science fiction novels. The problem is that the former are generally unwieldy or boring for the average reader, while the latter have little or no scientific value or basis.”

How to Defeat Your Own Clone fills that gap handily, adding just enough silly to make us stop and think.