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Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go began under the working title The Students' Novel. Instead of agonizing over their early expiration, the students would gradually become better humans, "learning how to love and to conduct good friendships, as well as learning how to read and write at a higher not just functional level."1 Ishiguro's stated authorial goal was to elaborate an extended metaphor for "the sadness of the human condition," essentially, our struggle with mortality.2 There are some assumptions here: what make us human (and better at it) are things like language, learning, love, and interhuman relationships. Readers ostensibly participate in the same routine: learning to lead richer lives by relating to fictional characters and practicing 'higher' level reading.

Latent in the novel's evolving premise is the notion that we look nearby the human to understand our own condition.3 Ishiguro asks us to join him in appreciating his characters as human, even as their species status is in flux. "Paradoxically," he writes, "I found that having clones as central characters made it very easy to allude to some of the oldest questions in literature...What does it mean to be human? What is the soul?"4 Ishiguro partially recognizes the terms of this paradox: the use of the futuristic (the clone) to access the ancient (questions of the human, the soul). But the liminal humanity of his characters is not just a convenient cog of the plot mechanics. Ishiguro's generation of the clone conjoins an examination of what makes a human life rich, with a consideration of what makes a life human, and what makes a life at all. These ambiguities of the clone deconstruct the process by which we come to care for actors (human, fictional, mixtures of the two). How can we perfect something that is intrinsic to us? To join Ishiguro in sculpting our humanity, then, is to accept the plasticity of the heading "human."

Indeed, while Ishiguro's concerns seem squarely for the human, a radio debate about Dolly the "cloned" sheep "was the final dimension that helped the story come alive."5 Dolly is often regarded romantically: a pure copy of a symbolically pure animal, a prophecy of a radical future in which clones hold the key to human health. Sarah Franklin debunks these myths in Dolly Mixtures, an anthropological exploration of the sexual politics of the biotech project. Dolly's queer conception in fact involved three sheep: the DNA of one ewe cell was injected into the denucleated cell of another; then the mixture matured inside the body of a third sheep. Franklin calls this a "metamix of sex, in which the reproductive possibilities of plants, animals and microorganisms are conjoined with biotechnological expertise."6The real innovation of Dolly was this toggle between sexual and asexual means of reproduction, so that "sex, which was never pure to begin with, is further hybridized through technological assistance to create a form of mixed-sex, known as the Dolly technique."7 Dolly denaturalizes origins. Franklin ultimately posits that "since sheep also mirror the human condition that they, more than any other animal, have helped to shape," Dolly could be considered a human clone, for she "resituates the cloning question as one of the human authorship of genealogy."8

Dolly is an auspicious point of inspiration for Never Let Me Go, not least because of her contested taxonomy. As if catching this generic and genealogical admixture, Never Let Me Go is categorically sheepish, we might say. Its indefinitely retrospective setting ('England, late 1990s') is the first sign of a generic discomfort. Critics contest the novel's status as a work of science fiction, a novel of manners, a school story, or some mix of the three.9