Foundling Fathers: Cloned Icons and Billionaire Games

Foundling Fathers, by Meg Ellison, imagines four brothers growing up on a plantation island, and receiving the best classical education from their devoted tutor. The brothers are Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams, and they’re growing up in the mid-1700s… until it turns out they aren’t.

Foundling Fathers is zany and dark by turns. A band of ultra-wealthy conservatives who yearn for the good old days cloned their favorite historical heroes, decided on the perfect education for future conservative leadership roles, and hired trained staff to raise them, 1700s-style. Naturally, Thomas Jefferson 2.0 is banging the servants.

This was a particularly interesting read because I’d recently finished Yesteryear, which tells a story with a republican dream of an imagined past and a semi-time-travel twist. It’s a wildly different story in every way… except… there’s a similar obsessive goal of recreating  an idealized, fictional past, no matter what lies need to be told or what the expense is.

Because I got Foundling Fathers on Netgalley as an ebook, I didn’t realize that it’s so short. I was mildly disappointed when the story ended, because I thought I was reading a set-up for an intriguing/zany novel about the cloned founders, but it was more of an intriguing/zany idea expressed as a short story. I don’t think this would disappointing for readers who realize going in that it’s a specfic idea in a novella, though.