Who Do We Think We Are? Identity in an Engineered Age

By Jeremy Clift, author of  Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse

A growing struggle over identity.

What does it mean to be yourself in a world in which your choices can be predicted, your memories can be altered, and your body redesigned? These questions are no longer the stuff of distant futures, they’re knocking at our door. And science fiction has long been the genre bold enough to stare them down.

In a world shaped by algorithms, edited genomes, and corporate influence, identity is no longer something fixed — it's something fought over. And by writing Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse, I wanted to explore these tensions through the eyes of a mother and her genetically engineered daughter. Diana wasn't born in the usual sense, she was designed to survive in deep space, a product of experimentation and ambition. But is she property or person? Prototype or child? The more powerful question may be: who decides?

This struggle over identity plays out not only in Diana’s story but in many corners of modern sci-fi — from synthetic beings asserting autonomy to clones questioning their origin stories. These characters echo our own cultural anxieties: How much of us is nature vs. nurture? What happens when corporations own our DNA or AI anticipates our every move? Can we choose who we are, or are we engineered into roles?

Science fiction lets us stretch these questions to the extreme — to the edge of space, to the future of evolution. But the heart of these stories is always intimate. In Space Vault, the fight for identity is grounded in something deeply human: a mother’s love. Teagan Ward isn’t just battling oppressive systems. She’s trying to preserve her daughter’s right to be something more than a tool of survival, to have a soul, a will, a future of her own making.

Inheriting the Self

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — often called the first science fiction novel — we’ve been haunted by the question of creation and selfhood. Frankenstein’s creature was not merely stitched together; he was rejected, left to forge his own sense of identity in a world that refused to recognize his humanity. That cry for recognition still echoes in today’s stories.

In Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, cloned children are raised to become organ donors. Their lives are quietly, beautifully tragic, not because they are unaware of their fate, but because they come to accept it. Ishiguro paints a portrait of identity shaped by roles so rigid that resistance feels almost unimaginable.

Starts at a seemingly idyllic Hailsham boarding school

And in Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit, an artificial intelligence is uploaded into a synthetic human body — forced to grapple with its sense of self, memory, and legality in a society that doesn’t recognize AI as a person. It’s a deeply intimate tale about learning who you are when your very existence is denied.

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice takes this further. Its protagonist, once the mind of a massive starship AI, is now confined to a single body. The novel explores identity through fragmentation, gender fluidity, and the trauma of being reduced from many to one. Identity here is political, technological, and deeply emotional.

Ownership and Autonomy

One of the most chilling ideas in Space Vault is that Diana is not be considered by some as a person at all. To the Consortium that helped create her, she’s a product, a technological leap forward, a genetic asset. Her rights, her feelings, her agency are incidental. That echoes real-world fears about the ownership of genetic material — fears already surfacing in biotech patent cases, fertility technology, and AI-generated likenesses.

Octavia Butler saw this coming. In her Xenogenesis (or Lilith’s Brood) trilogy, humanity is "saved" by a race of alien gene traders — but the price is autonomy. The aliens believe in improvement through integration, but the humans resist being changed without choice. The core conflict becomes not survival vs. extinction, but identity vs. assimilation.

In Altered Carbon by British novelist Richard K. Morgan, consciousness can be stored and transferred between bodies or “sleeves,” leading to a future where the wealthy live forever and bodies become disposable. It’s a noir tale, but also a cry of existential panic: If your body isn’t you, what is?

Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries also wrestles with identity and autonomy. The titular SecUnit is a construct — part machine, part cloned human — who overrides its programming but pretends to obey while secretly developing a sense of self. It’s a darkly humorous yet piercing meditation on personhood, privacy, and trust.

The Instability of Identity

Philip K. Dick practically built his career around the instability of identity. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the question isn’t whether androids can pass for human, it’s whether humans can maintain any moral high ground in a world that commodifies empathy. For Dick, identity is fragile, easily manipulated by false memories, corporate systems, or the paranoia of being watched. And in many ways, his work laid the groundwork for the age of digital selves and deepfakes we’re now entering.

Ursula K. Le Guin approached identity from more anthropological, more psychological angles. In The Left Hand of Darkness, she imagines a world where individuals are neither male nor female except during monthly periods of fertility. It’s a masterclass in how biology, language, and social norms shape identity — and how fluid those constructs really are. The protagonist, an envoy from a binary-gendered world, must confront not only his own assumptions, but the limitations of communication when words can’t fully express who someone is.

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed  (one of only a small number of books to win all three Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards for Best Novel) also unpacks identity, though in political terms. On one planet, society is structured around radical individualism; on the other, anarchist collectivism. The protagonist straddles both worlds, but fully at

Idenity and ideology.

home in neither. Here, identity becomes a question of ideology, belonging, and the often-painful tension between the self and the society that shaped it.

Even in her short fiction, Le Guin excels at revealing the quiet rebellions that shape the self. In stories such as “Nine Lives” and “The Matter of Seggri,” she examines how clones, gender roles, and communal minds redefine not only what we are, but what we can become. Her characters often resist categorization; and that resistance, Le Guin seems to say, is where identity truly begins.

Ted Chiang, though writing far fewer stories, operates in a similar philosophical space. In “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” identity unfolds over years as artificial beings — digients — are raised like children. Their development isn’t mechanical but emotional, shaped by love, trust, and betrayal. Chiang raises a vital question: if something learns

to care, does it matter how it was made?

Reframing Through a Futurist Lens

Nnedi Okorafor takes identity and reframes it through a distinctly African futurist lens, often blending science fiction with myth, ancestral memory, and post-colonial legacy. In Binti, a Himba girl leaves her Earth-bound community to study at a prestigious interstellar university, becoming a symbol of cultural dislocation and transformation. But along with integration, her journey is about adaptation on her own terms. Through her interactions with alien species, Binti literally and figuratively transforms, embodying a hybrid identity that challenges both tradition and technological dominance.

In Lagoon, Okorafor turns the alien invasion narrative inward, showing how individuals respond as more than citizens or species, but as layered beings shaped by faith, history, gender, and politics. Her characters metabolize the unknown into something new. Identity, in her work, is porous. It’s not simply what you inherit; it’s what you reclaim and reshape under pressure.

Ken Liu, meanwhile, dives into the intersections of technology, language, and memory. In “The Paper Menagerie,” identity is tied to heritage and the slow erosion of cultural memory across generations. It’s not science fiction in the traditional sense, but it captures the emotional dissonance of being caught between worlds — something deeply relevant in an age of global migration and diaspora. In his larger body of work, including The Grace of Kings and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, Liu often asks: when your past has been erased or distorted, how do you rebuild the story of who you are?

In Space Vault, these tensions come to a head not just through biology, but through surveillance and control. Zaun, the all-seeing AI that governs the Draxid, was designed to optimize its species’ futures — but ended up determining them. For Teagan and Diana, escaping Zaun isn’t just a matter of physical freedom. It’s about reclaiming the right to make unscripted choices. When an algorithm decides who you are and what you’re worth, what happens to your essence, your unpredictability, your soul?

A person, not a product.

While Teagan primarily wants to protect Diana from harm, she also wants her daughter to be seen as more than a blueprint or a breakthrough, but as a person, a girl with dreams, with fears, with joy and choice.

Making the Cosmic Personal

That, I think, is the power of science fiction: it makes the cosmic personal. It turns abstract dilemmas into flesh-and-blood struggles. And it reminds us that in the face of all this engineered complexity, identity is still something fiercely human. Not because it’s fixed, but because it’s felt.

Across these stories — from Shelley to Le Guin, Okorafor to Liu — we see identity not as a fixed point, but as a frontier. Sci-fi at its best doesn’t just imagine new technologies or distant futures. It asks how those futures will shape our sense of self — and what it means to fight for that self when systems, species, or empires try to define it for us.

That’s what I wanted to explore in Space Vault. For Teagan Ward, identity is not a philosophical puzzle, it’s personal, maternal, immediate. Her daughter Diana is caught between what she was created to be and who she might choose to become. And Teagan, a survivor of experiments and betrayal, is determined to give her that choice, to protect the right to selfhood, even in a world where evolution is patented and survival is politicized.

Because in the end, identity is so much more than genes or code or categories. It’s about where we’re going and who we choose to become.

— Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space  and Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse.  Read Clift’s profile on Kirkus.