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"We are all repositories for genetically-encoded information that we're all spreading back and forth amongst each other, all the time. We're just lousy with information."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| ChickieNobs | ||
| Chicken meat sliced from a transgenic organism. |
| "This is the latest," said Crake.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing. "What the hell is it?" said Jimmy. "Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit. "But there aren't any heads..." "That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those." |
| Technovelgy from Oryx and Crake,
by Margaret Atwood. Published by Nan A. Talese in 2003 Additional resources -
|
Would you eat one? The characters in the story aren't too sure - "it would be like eating a large wart."
Compare to artificial food from The World Set Free (1914) by H.G. Wells,
synthetic food from Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Keller,
syntho-steak from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein,
vat meat from The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz,
Chicken Little from The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth,
animal tissue culture vat from Uller Uprising (1952) by H. Beam Piper,
carniculture plants (factories) from Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper,
butcher plant from Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford Simak,
pseudoflesh from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert, and
vat-grown meat from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Oryx and Crake
More Ideas
and Technology by Margaret Atwood
Tech news articles related to Oryx and Crake
Tech news articles related to works by Margaret Atwood
ChickieNobs-related
news articles:
- Do Mutant Chickens Offer 'Maximum, Diabolical Meatiness'?
| Holland Factory 3D Printing 500 Tons Of Steak Per Month |
| Robochef Robotic Food Prep |
| Drone Deliveries Instead Of Waiters In Restaurants? |
| SliceIt! Why Not Teach Robots To Use Knives? |
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'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
