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I've been having a dig around in the text trying to get a clearer idea of when the story is set. It's easy to assume references to the "fifties" and "sixties" mean 1950s and 1960s, but it need not be so. The "Judy Bridgewater" tape was said to be recorded in 1956, but that need not be the most recent "fifties".
The explanation for the clone/donor situation is described as: "After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions." The reader is likely to assume WW2, but - again - that assumption need not be correct.
Perhaps the clearest indicator might be this fragment: "Rodney. He went around with his hair tied back in a ponytail, like a rock musician from the seventies" as this would appear to tie the story "seventies" to our own "seventies". But then, since that would make this an alternative history setting, there would have been no need for the story's 1970s to also have had long-haired musicians.
Not that it really matters. Yes, such vagueness of detail means this story does not work well as a traditional science-fiction story, but it's not intended to be a traditional science-fiction story - that much seems clear enough.
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