Introduction
Cloning Mammoths
In 2001, a year with great science-fictional significance if ever there was one, Gregory Benford and I were talking about Jurassic Park and the thrilling (but not terribly likely) possibility of resurrecting dinosaurs through modern cloning techniques. There were many reasons to believe that such a project was not scientifically feasible.
Cloning other extinct animals, however, wouldn’t be so far-fetched. In fact, Greg pointed out some exploratory projects under way to take mammoth DNA recovered from well-preserved carcasses frozen in Siberia and use a modern elephant as a surrogate mother. Majestic woolly mammoths could once again walk the Earth. We found it a fascinating idea, not just for a story but it sparked our imaginations as human beings.
Especially, once we did a little research to discover that mammoths were quite likely made extinct through the actions of prehistoric man, we saw a larger story. If humans were indeed responsible for eradicating an entire species and we now had the ability to bring the species back, were we not morally obligated to do so?
And what about the dodo? The passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian tiger, and any number of other recent extinctions we had caused?
We started sending each other clippings, news articles, scientific reports. Research teams around the world were actually trying to do this—it seemed far more likely that we would see resurrected mammoths in our lifetimes than we would find ourselves cornered by velociraptors or T. rexes.
We wrote a novella based around the idea, “Mammoth Dawn,” which was featured as the lead story in the venerable science fiction magazine Analog in 2002, which got considerable attention. But the idea seemed much too big to warrant only a short story. Over the next couple of years, Greg and I kept bouncing ideas back and forth, and we met several times to outline Mammoth Dawn as a full-blown novel. We wrote a detailed outline for the novel, chapter by chapter, adding many characters and storylines, turning this into an ambitious epic, of which the original novella would be only the first part. The outline itself ran longer than 20,000 words. Greg used his knowledge of Russian culture (he speaks the language) and even sailed up to Alaska for background flavor.
The novel of Mammoth Dawn would be a huge project, even for a pair of seasoned writers, entailing a great deal of travel, research, and likely years of writing. We loved the idea.
We didn’t have time for it, but we meant to.
Greg and I each had other novel commitments, speaking engagements, travel obligations, and as each of us got busier and busier, Mammoth Dawn kept taking the back burner. Eventually, we set it aside, sure we would come back to it “someday.”
A few months ago I saw a science special on TV, “How to Clone a Woolly Mammoth,” that detailed the state of the current cloning efforts. Even though Greg and I had stopped working on our novel, the scientists had not abandoned their dreams. In the decade since we’d begun our plot development, research into resurrection cloning had advanced greatly.
And as expected, the controversy over the very idea had proceeded along very similar lines to what we had postulated in our story.
I looked at our materials—the original novella and our very detailed novel outline—and realized we had already written enough for a book, and we were determined to publish it before a real woolly mammoth came knocking at our door. I contacted Greg and we agreed to release Mammoth Dawn. He wrote a summary essay, included here, that describes the state of current work and the very real possibility that a mammoth will be appearing soon.
On the ethical issues, we believe they are best considered in the light of a close look at the imaginative possibilities—a task best done by fiction. See what you think after reading the ideas we outline here.
It’s not going to be just a story for much longer.
—Kevin J. Anderson