Kooshmeister
The King of Koosh!
Bad Movie Lover
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Posts: 516
Must have caffeine...
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« on: May 19, 2010, 10:03:01 AM » |
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On my short list of novels that were never made into films but need to be, there is The Clone. Jointly written in 1965 by Theodore L. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm, and based upon Thomas' earlier 1959 short story of the same name. The Clone was nominated for a Nebula Award, but lost to a little book by Frank Herbert called Dune. Which itself has since gone on to become a science fiction classic. And a really disturbing David Lynch movie, but we're not here to discuss Herbert's masterpiece. We're here to discuss one of the many novels that it beat out for the Nebula Award
The Clone begins auspiciously enough. Some janitors in a Chicago office building pour cleaning chemicals containing muriatic acid and trisodium phosphate down the sink and they wind up in the sewer, where they mingle with other refuse (silica gel and hamburger meat most notably). The warm sewer water allows a new life form to spring forth from these combined ingredients: an amorphous blob of green slime which quickly begins spreading through the sewers and aqueducts beneath Chicago, soon flowing up into people's homes through their drains.
The creature is dubbed "the clone." Why? Well, it absorbs and converts the cells of other living things into its own, replicating itself, but never intentionally creating separate copies of itself (although this does happen a couple of times). So I guess this is a kind of cloning, as it "clones" itself by converting its victims into its own mass and growing larger.
But the novel keeps calling it "the clone," so that's what I'll call it.
Its modus operandi is to have pieces of itself, tentacle-like, emerge from drains and faucets and attach itself to people. On contact the person is immediately fused to the clone and the absorbing process begins within seconds. It can even get at you through your clothing, provided you're wearing a specific type of fabric (the clone absorbs more than just organic matter). The assimilation process is totally painless which is the main difference between this and the similar The Blob.
The first thing one notices about the book is how the authors avoid any pretense of mystery about the monster's creation. This is told in great detail in the first chapter. As a result, the reader is aware of the nature of the menace but the characters (such as they are) are not. The characters themselves are mostly ciphers, with the closest thing to a hero being Dr. Mark Kenniston, a junior pathologist who winds up deducing the nature of the clone and how to deal with it.
The episodic nature of the writing means everything jumps from one situation to the next very quickly, and also the chapters are all a handful of very large, long single paragraphs without dialogue, make it difficult for the reader to properly understand what was just described and digest everything (no pun intended), forcing them to repeatedly backtrack and reread to see what, if anything, they missed. This gets tiresome very quickly and I wound up skimming the last half of the book instead of reading it in-depth out of sheer annoyance.
Nevertheless, it's interesting premise (a variation of the tried and true "blob monster" shtick) and deserves a readthrough. Although it's out of print, it can be bought cheap on eBay, Amazon and other websites. It may even, if handled correctly, make a pretty decent movie. An adaptation of a lesser-known novel is certainly better than all the remakes we're getting lately.
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