3

Here is what I remember:

  1. Read in the late 80's or early 90's.
  2. Main character is a woman, but as a child, had been gender swapped to male.
  3. Recently "woke up" as a previous incarnation had been brutally murdered.
  4. Turns out that there is a male version of herself, an illegal clone.
  5. Takes place on a space station, so the extra clone is using valuable resources.
  6. The clone was created by mistake. Some criminals stole several clones and revived them, believing one of them would be worth ransoming.
|improve this question
  • Did they have an artistic hobby of sculpting weather events? – FuzzyBoots Aug 31 '17 at 17:30
  • Not that I can remember. I've added more to the list. – Jim Green Aug 31 '17 at 17:34
  • I assume that this book was set in he future – Guy Aug 31 '17 at 17:39
  • I'm pretty sure that I read this one as part of a collection, but I can't seem to find it in my recent reading history. I remember another one of the stories in the collection involved a pair of "half siblings" on another planet in the solar system (Mercury or Venus, I think) who have to come to grips with that one of them is a clone of the other, culminating in a scene where they're stuck in a cave-in on a lake of mercury, skin-to-skin as the result of a need to share their energy-field spacesuits. – FuzzyBoots Aug 31 '17 at 17:42
  • 1
    While this may turn out to be a duplicate, we don't close story-id questions as dupes unless the OP confirms that the dupe contains the answer. – Blackwood Sep 1 '17 at 20:26
6

This is one of the stories included in one of John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline collections -- I believe it's The Barbie Murders, the individual story is titled "The Phantom of Kansas" (thanks, FuzzyBoots!). Fox, a weather designer, is the victim of a botched attempt at clone-napping. The conflict arises because of Lunar law, which prohibits two living people having the same genome (Varley never did say what they'd do with natural identical twins -- reproduction was assisted enough by then, they might never had had those). The clone, who calls himself Rat, makes himself known to Fox by real-time tampering with a tornado Fox had designed.

In the end, they find a way to get Rat onto a ship bound for Pluto, where genetic laws like Luna's don't (yet) exist, so Rat won't be under a death sentence.

|improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.