"It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet. It was pretty impressive, considering the boy had started from zero."
These two small sentences at the start of Meg Ellison's Foundling Fathers set the tone for this small but mighty work, a brilliant and absurd bit of speculative fiction that poses as many questions as answers in considering one key hypothetical: What if human cloning were possible?
What follows is a brutal imagining of this kind of scientific potential in the context of 21st-century U.S. politics, driven by power and greed and a desire to be "great," absent the moral reckoning required in unpacking the mythology of history. In the real world of 2026, billionaires are launching spacecraft, big tech is pouring unseemly amounts of money to deregulate AI, and society has made little to no progress on ensuring basic human rights for all people. So it's not so hard to believe that in Elison's speculative 2026, the ability to clone humans has been used not to advance scientific breakthroughs, cure diseases, or feed the hungry, but instead to rebirth the Founding Fathers in a misguided attempt to return their perceived genius to the political mess that is the United States. "The only way forward is to go back," the moneyed elite argue in a board meeting miles from where the cloned boys are being raised to believe it's 1750; "to re-center this nation on its founding principles."
"Every country has a myth," Elison notes in her afterword, "but we have an easier time spotting propaganda when it isn't ours." Foundling Fathers points readers in the direction of that myth, revealing truths about both contemporary U.S. politics and its historical context. Like all good satire, some of these revelations are uncomfortable, some disturbing. But Elison's sharp sense of humor keeps the novel from ever feeling heavy or pedantic; turns out imagining the Founding Fathers as teen boys imprisoned on a small island in they believe is 1750 provides no shortage of laughs, whether it's Franklin's discovery of porn or the bickering and in-fighting among the boys that will feel all too familiar for anyone with siblings of their own.
Foundling Fathers is a timely send-up (and takedown) of the billionaire ruling class, a delicate unpacking of the myths of the U.S.'s earliest days, and a sharp and insightful work of satire that cracks the very foundations of the present political moment in ways that are as necessary as they are unsettling. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer
Shelf Talker: This sharp and insightful work of speculative satire pokes holes in the formative myths of the United States via a world in which human cloning is used to rebirth the Founding Fathers.