The Bradbury Report - Softcover

BookPage.com
“Artless as the narrator pretends to be, there are passages here that stand unsurpassed in the catalogue of speculative fiction for pure, shattering pathos. The existential quandary of Samuel Beckett’s characters cannot hold a candle to the cosmic despair of Alan, the clone, when he discovers who—or rather, what—he is. Just as in Beecher Stowe, Dickens, Orwell—and yes, Bradbury—Polansky’s outrage against human arrogance and cruelty is overwhelming, all the more so because the suffering human being in this case has no existence at all, apart from that which human arrogance and cruelty have bestowed upon him. The Bradbury Report shows us supremely well that to be human is to weep, and to weep is to be drawn in the first place from the womb, and no place else.”

St. Paul Pioneer Press
“... Polansky is really telling the story of lonely people, of what it means to be human, of the moral choices in advances of technology. And he does it with gorgeous, unhurried writing that makes us ache for all the characters.”

Kirkus
"An inventive, cerebral thriller about a man faced with the ultimate moral quandary...sublimely witty and soulfully sympathetic."

Michael Cart, Booklist, 4/1/2010
The year is 2071; the U.S. has become a rogue nation, the only country in the civilized world where cloning is legal and state sponsored. As a result, some 250 million clones are being kept sequestered ina top-secret, closely guarded area of the Great Plains called "The Clearances." What is their life like? What are they like? No one knows until the day one of them somehow wanders off the reservation and is captured by a shadowy anti-cloning resistance group. Rather improbably, one of the resistors, Anna, recognizes the escapee as being the clone of a former college boyfriend whom she hasn't seen in 40 years. Tracking him down, she persuades him to become the first "original" ever to meet his copy and--using the pseudonym "Ray Bradbury"--to write a report detailing the experience, a report that can be used against the government and its cloning program. This ambitious, sometimes chilling, sometimes heartbreaking novel is that report, a document that reveals as much about "Ray" and Anna as it does the clone. Polansky does an extraordinary job of imagining the condition of being a human copy, while challenging readers to consider the ethicality and inhumanity of such human engineering.