"Nine Lives"

"Nine Lives"
by Ursula K. Le Guin
pub. 1968 Playboy
restored and reprinted in The Wind's Twelve Quarters

Preview

Background
Data

Navigation
Guide

Further
Exploration

Preview

Two men stationed on a harsh and isolated planet are joined by a set of ten clones. Then nine of the clones are killed in a mining accident.

Background Data

The story is perhaps Le Guin's most famous.

Editors at Playboy asked her to publish under the byline "U.K.Le Guin" in order to disguise her gender. Le Guin writes that this was the first and only time she met sexual prejudice from an editor or publisher and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that she failed to see that it was also important.

Inspiration for the story came from the chapter on cloning in The Biological Time Bomb (1968) by Gordon Rattay Taylor.

In her introduction to the story in her collection, Le Guin says that this is about as hard-core as her science fiction gets. She says the story is the

working out of a theme directly extrapolated from contemporary work in one of the quantitative sciences--a what-if story. The theme, however, is developed qualitatively, psychologically. Essentially I am using the scientific element, not as an end in itself, but as a metaphor or symbol, a means of saying something not otherwise expressible.

Navigation Guide

Of what significance to the story is the setting?

How would you describe the relationship between Pugh and Martin as the story opens, that is, before the clone arrives?

Describe the 10-clone. What are their advantages and disadvantages? Do you consider them truly human?

Describe the relationship between Pugh and Martin and the 10-clone.

Of what significance is the setting of the accident that kills all but one of the 10-clone?

What is wrong with Kaph, the surviving clone, and why?

What eventually happens to him?

The story explores the complications of cloning humans. What effect, if any, does this story have on your attitude toward the cloning of humans?

Further Exploration

This story conveys a social message on loneliness, alienation, and aspects of identity:

loneliness of the self
the impossibility of understanding the self except through its relationship to the other
the human need to establish that relationship through reaching out to the other in love

In her essay"On Theme" Le Guin notes that at the end of the story Kaph is no longer self-sufficient:

Self-sufficient. There the hammer strikes the great bells. What does it mean? to be sufficient to yourself? What is a self? Can a self be sufficient to itself: If not, what is the role of the Other? Is the existence of a foreign self a threat or a necessity, or both? And what is the role of total otherness--of death? Can a being unaware of itself be aware of its own mortality, and conversely, can a being ignorant of its own mortality be aware of itself--or of the Other?

I didn't answer any of these questions [in "Nine Lives"], of course. To get a question asked properly is all I hope to do. . . .