This is not for me at all. In typical post apocalyptic fashion, the world as we know it ends. How? All of the ways, it would seem. It's a cold war anxiety grab bag. Radiation poisoning, mass fertility failings and plagues across every species ever, political fragmentation, and shortages of earth elements, for some reason. Through all of this one family is somehow smart enough to come up with the only working survival plan and maintain some degree of reproduction through cloning in a little isolated commune, but they aren't smart enough to realize that in this situation life is expensive and it is therefore not a great idea to kill off or make into an object any person who feels a touch of mental illness or has an independent thought. For, as it turns out, the problem with cloning in this book is that people are almost entirely derived from their genetic material, and cloning therefore produces copies with no desire for self determination or individualism. From there, it's not hard to see where it's going. Of course a person or two accidentally acquires a mind of their own, of course this sets up some larger conflict between society and the individual, and of course we get to debate whether the longing for self determination is a trait required to be fully human. I realize that a lot of this was less predictable back when the novel was written, but I don't find these lines of questioning particularly edifying or nuanced here. So there we have it, another post-apocalyptic book that I do not like.