Journal #4 By: Tom Millard

Journal #4


In today’s society cloning is considered by most to be ethically wrong but in the novel The House of the Scorpion cloning is a more or less an acceptable thing to do. Clones are not thought of as humans they are more closely compared to animals because their ability to think was destroyed when they were “harvested” . It is illegal for a clone not to have their intelligence destroyed at birth but El Patron was so wealthy he could get around the law and so Matt was not a normal clone. Unlike most clones Matt could think and learn and as much as possible when being a clone of someone be his own person. In the book Matt is seen as a socially unacceptable being and this was an issue for most of the people he met with the exception of the people who really got to know Matt for who he really was not what he was or how he was born. Such as Maria, Celia, Tam Lin and his friends from Aztlan. This book is a very different style compared to other books that I have read. It is longer than books I usually read. It is probably longer because of the amount of detail and description used the tell the story. I usually read books where the setting is Canada or The United States. But in this book the setting is in a made up county that is not similar to The United States or Canada. This book is set in the future where thing are very different from the way things actually are and I tend to read books that are set in current time and thing are pretty similar to the way my life is.