There was a terrible movie a few years ago called Children of Men. It was dark and grimy and violent and has one of the top 10 most shocking movie deaths ever. In that story, all women were rendered sterile by some sort of plague, and the species was dying out. There was one woman that was still fertile, and governments were fighting over access, hoping to harvest her eggs and rebuild our species from that. Of course, everything goes wrong. It's that kind of movie. The script writers will say it was a metaphor for how govt should stay out of abortion or doom us all. But that's not quite true.
The thing is, that plot-setting was stolen from a Japanese scifi comedy called Saber Marionette J, from the 1990's. It was so popular it had three series sequels. It never gave up on the comedy either. SMJ was hilarious because it was about android wives for an unfortunate batch of space colonists who lost their colony ship in an orbital collision. Six men survived landing, so they opted to clone themselves, with differences and variations, to repopulate this otherwise habitable planet. 300 years builds an entire planet of men. Only men.
Some, of course, end up gay, but the rest buy advanced androids shaped like women, called Marionettes. Most are merely programs. Subservient women shaped robots that serve the food and clean the house and only do what they are told. They aren't as fun as a real woman would be. They don't have moods or emotions. But a few do. Very few have actual awareness, emotions, personality, ambitions. They are still androids but they are also alive, emotionally speaking. This is quite exotic for a world where such things are lost to time.
Leftover ship technology turns up in interesting places, like abandoned building basements. Since everyone is cloned, genetic locks open for any clones too, so doors have a 1:6 chance to open, computers to activate, stuff to turn ON accidentally. It makes for more comedy. Not like bombing a coffee shop full of people weeping like in Children of Men. What a depressing failure that was. And it's NOT original. It's a second rate Emo copy of SMJ, without even the benefit of cloning to solve their problem. They went for cheap violence: bombs and guns. Sigh.
Keep in mind that SMJ spawned their own fan works, which became manga and then anime of their own. Vandread was about the War of the Sexes going into space, and cloning allows the survivors not to marry, not to require men or women to reproduce. They tell nasty stories about the wars with the other gender, complete with space battles and mecha to kill each other. Vandread has lots of comedy, but eventually goes to a dark place. Few manga authors know anything but drawing, so they aren't up on gene cloning or stem cells or how those work. If you can go to space, you can clone organs. You don't need to harvest them. That's really a popular myth in the face of modern science. There's even a nasty bit of RNA lurking in our genome which can activate some rather terrifying feral monster parts of our DNA, stuff that makes us heal much faster and become hyper aggressive, like the Reavers in Firefly. There's also an RNA strand that makes us largely immune to radiation damage, but precisely what sequence this is is protected by govt. After all, someone with that could build a nuke or dirty bomb and probably not die from handling the isotopes. But that's very cutting edge. It isn't in anime. After all, if there were women on the shuttles, even if they didn't live, you can still clone from tissue samples. Even hair or fingernails.
Work is being done to clone mammoths from hair and ivory. Both contain sufficient DNA to build the entire animal. Not that they should, but they are doing it anyway. Maybe they'll get around to Mastodons and Hippos and Giant Ground Sloths too. Meh. Those suckers were huge. I haven't seen any anime or scifi depicting those yet. Not realistically anyway. Right now they're competition for resources. Maybe in the future, a wetter future with more plants and fewer deserts, we can have those running loose again. I bet Auroch bulls would really cut down the arab nonsense. A bull 20 feet long and 9 feet at the shoulder with 16 foot wide horns, which can run 45 mph and has a hoof as wide as your head? Sure, that sounds dangerous enough to prove a challenge. Set them loose. They'd probably tear apart the adobe cities and trample jeeps and cars underfoot. These things existed until about 9000 years ago, all across the Sahara and Egypt and Arabia and Persia. Picture that.
And keep in mind that bulls, in the forest in Europe, used to be the #1 killer of people 2500 years ago. These were little ones, barely larger than modern. They were poodle-vicious though. Attack anything that moves, like your little sister or your mom picking berries. They don't care. European men got very angry and developed the techniques to kill them. The Spaniards still use them in bull fighting. The Ring is the size and shape of a typical forest meadow. I appreciate their efforts. They are trying to breed back this fierceness, because life isn't safe. Safety is an illusion.
DNA cloning needs to be a more common thing in scifi because it is happening in the real world. It was abused by Hollywood crap-movies, with various mutants and mad scientists. Endless retellings of Frankenstein's monster, a bit of necromancy rather than science. Thank girly sleepovers for that one. It is now cliché, but it is happening. It needs to be treated honestly, like computers. Its not hand waving territory anymore. People actually know how it works.
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