PIECES OF FAME

It wasn't all that far into the future; a couple of light years, a couple of dark years maybe, from where Earth is now in its flight through space. On the implant screens you could see ads for the bones and muscles of galactic celebrities, the hair, eyes, noses, cheekbones, teeth, chins etc. of top mentavision stars now discontinued who had sold their bodies prehumously for vast sums, the precious corpses now reduced to their marketable components and cloned by the great body merchants for sale to those wealthy enough to want the precise nose or other organ that had been so famous and still was, thanks to the ads that showed those renowned body parts in settings like the most precious jewels: famous eyes on silk, famous chins on velvet, famous teeth in jaws of solid gold---and in those days, nearly everyone was rich enough to have at least a piece of some celebrity, for there weren't that many nonclones left, and all wanted to be famous, at least in part; for the wealthiest, though, it was possible, even rather common, to be a total pastiche of fame; to be, as some of the merely upper class so snidely put it, completely who you were not, as so many were.

I wrote that sci-fi flash nearly 20 years ago, never thought I'd actually live to see it begin:

"He and Ms Jackson picked different aspects of famous faces to mould him into Ken, settling on Tom Cruise's eyes, Brad Pitt's nose, George Clooney's lips, Russell Crowe's chin, Johnny Depp's cheekbones and Jude Law's teeth."

and

"A male Jennifer Lopez fan has been transformed into his idol on MTV's I Want A Famous Face."

From a news item on NEWS.com.au.