Korean scientist in your speculative fiction?

The Koreans announced their space exploration plans today. They've got a lot to accomplish in the next couple of decades on the moon.

This is the second scientific piece of news out of Korea to end up on this blog. Interesting. There must be a plethora of creative scientific minds in this nation...or Kim Jong Il just north of the border gives the populace lots of motivation for a different kind of future.

For whatever reason, if a person is writing a piece of speculative fiction, featuring a prominent Korean scientist would make a lot of sense. He doesn't have to be a space scientist either, he could be a roboticist. Here are a few previous posts this year to cover that Korean subject:

• a post in March about robot rights
  
• more reflection in May
  
• most recent thoughts on it in July
  

Now that they're squarely in the mix of both space and robotics, what will be the next scientific announcement out of Korea. I'm venturing a guess it won't be about cloning.

Cloning in fiction

Recent news of rhesus monkey cloning will motivate writers to again consider speculative fiction based on this technology. There is a rich collection of such stories and novels along this line and I'm certain more will follow.

Although not the first story to feature cloning, Ursula K. LeGuin wrote Nine Lives back in 1969. Six years later Arthur C. Clarke wrote Imperial Earth followed by Ben Bova's novel The Multiple Man a few years later -- great writers and some fascinating fiction that Hollywood would attach itself to many times over.

There is the classic mutation cloning movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. It was pretty creepy first time around and even weirder, in my opinion, when they brought in Brando for the remake decades later. One really good cloning film, however, is The Boys from Brazil. I watched it in the cinema when it came out in 1978 with lots of Hollywood buzz. Gregory Peck really nailed the part of the sinister Josef Mangele and Laurence Olivier was superb as Nazi hunter Lieberman. The movie was based on an Ira Levin novel that I have not yet read. If you have, feel free to post a comment here on it.

Yes, there is a wealth of cloning fiction out there -- much of it quite inventive. Although I don't personally have a story in mind revolving around such technology, I'm looking forward to reading the next one that does.