As we write, there is a furore over a small group of people who are proposing to clone a human being. It's a major story, but very few newspapers are reporting the most likely result of this attempt, which will be abject failure. It took 277 failures, many rather nasty, before Dolly the Sheep was cloned, and she has now been found to have serious genetic defects, poor lamb.

Trying to clone a human may indeed be unethical, but that's not the best reason for objecting to this misguided and foolish attempt. The best reason is that it won't work, because nobody yet knows how to overcome numerous technical obstacles; moreover, if by some stroke of

(mis)fortune it did happen to work, any child produced would have serious defects. Producing such a child, now that is unethical.

Making 'carbon copies' of human beings, which is the usual basis of the newspapers' story about the ethics, is beside the point. That's not what cloning does, anyway. Dolly the Sheep was not genetically identical to her mother, though she came close. Even if she had been, she would still have been a different sheep, moulded by different experiences. For that matter, the same would be true even if she was genetically identical to her mother. For the same reason, cloning a dead child will not bring that child back to life. Much of the media discussion of the ethics of cloning, like much of the public understanding of science, is vaguely stirred through with science fiction.

In this arena, as in so many, the power of the story outweighs any questions about the real factual basis.

Human beings do not just tell stories, or just listen to them. The are more like Granny Weatherwax, who is aware of the power of stories on Discworld, and refuses to be trapped by the story's narrativium. Instead, she uses the power of story to mould events according to her own wishes.