I must get around to reading the rest of those books. I
think I own all of them (can't be 100% certain without checking) but have only read Drew's and a couple of others. Even then there are understandable inconsistencies, given that most were written when the game was still in pre-production. Heck, even if you go back to the original novella (also written before the '84 game's release) there's a scene that implies holograms may have a physical presence. Or that the protagonist is losing his marbles I guess, depending on interpretation.
Yeah, I've read all the interpretations and it's cool that it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me. This isn't
Altered Carbon. When I sit down to play the game I control an avatar (actually one of two avatars, depending on which account I'm playing) and that's a necessary conceit given that I'm playing a videogame. But for all intents and purposes that avatar is me, within the
Elite universe. If that avatar is actually an avatar of a character whose avatar I'm controlling, it's one level too removed for me. The immediacy is part of why
ED's environment works for me, especially when it comes to the sense of scale and isolation and of how lonely it is to "die" of stupidity tens of thousands of light-years from home. If the lore is that I'm a clone, it breaks that because it removes that sense of both isolation and of risk.
I know it's daft from some people's perspectives because all it's really doing is taking a conceit I already accept (my avatar dies and is respawned when real-world me presses some buttons on a screen) and translating it into an in-universe conceit (my clone dies and is respawned because
game-world me has some tech-the-tech insurance policy). All I know is that the very idea dilutes some of the magic for me, and if implemented would require some serious mental effort on my part to retcon it out of the game world and restore that magic. I already do this to some degree with other in-game tech. For instance, my Anaconda is plenty big enough that its SLF bay holds several replacement fighters in self-assembly kit form, without the need for 3D printing. The smaller ships? I try not to think about it too much, and rarely fit SLFs to them. I really don't want to have to do these sorts of mental gymnastics with cloning technology, but at the end of the day it's FD's call.
There's certainly no technical or lore reason
not to have clones in
ED; they too are mentioned in the original novella, albeit as a reproductive choice rather than a means to transcend death. It's the memory transfer that's the step too far for me. It would make the characters immortal, almost godlike. Which technically they already are because they're videogame characters, but they don't know that
. Besides, there's already a godlike entity that acts as a memory transfer between my characters' lives. It exists outside of the game, and it's me sat in this chair. I see no reason to move that "feature" into the game universe just as a way of explaining something that IMO doesn't require an explanation.
But it's wholly subjective I grant you, something I've always acknowledged whenever this topic has come up.
In my head my character does die. They're sitting in or on a starship cockpit or bridge when it explodes, which is fairly terminal in my book, and the game stops for a bit. Then I select some options and the game starts up again, with my character on a space station and facing a bill for a ship he recently lost. Does he remember his death, or do I remember it for him? It's all a bit metaphysical but I've never had a problem with it, nor needed an explanation that risks upsetting my relationship to the game and its flawed but immersive universe.
But light-years per tonne obviously vary.