What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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Asexual clone created in lab is the savior of the world?
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-According to an article in "New York Magazine," (April 5, 2004), "Stories about cloned Jesuses first surfaced in 1988 when the sci-fi novel Children of the Shroud was published." That novel, by Garfield Reeves-Stevens, had dozens of teenage Jesus clones being hunted by a televangelist on behalf of a U.S. president eager to start the war of Armageddon. Each clone was slightly different because of the DNA reconstruction technique used to create them, with the kicker being some of them were female.
-The Robert Rankin novel The Brentford Chainstore Massacre had Jesus cloned from DNA found on the Turin shroud. He actually plans to clone multiple Jesuses so that every religion can have one (no, it Makes Just as Much Sense in Context), but only does two to start with who turn out to be a good Jesus and a bad Jesus.
-A major subplot in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Choke involves the main character discovering that he may have been created as a clone from Jesus' foreskin. Which may or may not explain why he's such a prick.
-The novel The Return by Joe de Mer features an apparent Second Coming investigated by the Vatican as a possible hoax and/or cloning of Jesus.
-Bill Myers' Blood of Heaven features a lighter version, in which the dried blood on a religious artifact (a thorn preserved in a wax cube) is discovered to contain foreign chromosomes (specifically, the Y). Replicating the blood through genetic engineering and transfusing it into first animals, then humans, has... interesting results.
-Obviously used in the Christ Clone Trilogy by James Beauseigneur, except he's the Antichrist. Like the example above, this also uses the Shroud of Turin as the source of DNA.
-In Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski's novel The Killing Star, one of the few groups of humans who survived an alien attack against Earth is a habitat orbiting Jupiter, led by a clone of Jesus and his best friend, a clone of the Buddha, who were created by a cult some years earlier.
-In American Desert by Percival Everett, this doesn't quite work out, and most of the clones are horribly deformed physically and mentally. One researcher on the project appears in-story, despairing at his failure-until the main character asks how one mouthless clone can eat, and the researcher realizes that it's survived without anyone ever feeding it.
-This is pretty much the entire point of the 1993 novel The Blood Of The Lamb, as the protagonist Peter Careza grapples with the implications that he is Christ on Earth. By the end of the book, it's fairly clear that he's the Anti Christ.
-The Riverworld series is set on a world populated by clones of everyone who ever lived, into which their dead spirits have been transplanted. A short story based on the novels reveals what happens to the Riverworld's re-created Jesus.
-In "The Divinity Gene", a short story by Matthew J. Trafford, the DNA sequence of Jesus is used to create numerous Jesus clones or "Jesi."
-In "Born-Again Jesus," a short story by Robert Flynn, a secret group plans to clone Jesus so that he can preach a gospel more in line with current American values.
-In "The Gospel According to Jimmy", by French writer Didier van Cauwelaert, a 32-year old pool cleaner in L.A. finds out he's a clone of Jesus.
-In one story in the Church of the SubGenius's anthology Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", "Bob" Dobbs stops the Deroes from cloning Hitler with a little sleight of hand to replace the bloody cloth they were using as a DNA source with a scrap of the Shroud of Turin.
-Downplayed in Robin Cook's Seizure where a conservative U.S. senator suffering from Parkinson's disease is undergoing a therapy (which he was about to ban in the first place) in which a patient with an incurable disease is returned to health through the injection of cloned stem cells. He wants the stem cells injected into his brain to come from the Shroud of Turin. Afterwards, he indeed experiences some messianic visions but it turns out that they were temporal lobe epilepsy-seizures caused by dislocated injection, not by the origin of cells. So, no copy of Jesus in this book, only His cells.