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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Syrup Sac | ||
| A device used to provide an efficient source of nutrition to Meks, servants of the aristocrats of Earth. |
In this marvelous novel by Jack Vance, the Meks are brought to Earth to serve the needs of the last aristocrats - expatriots who had returned to the deserted Earth in the far future.
| The Mek, standing as if a specimen in a museum case, was a manlike creature, native, in his original version, to a planet of Etamin. His tough rusty-bronze hide glistened metallically as if oiled or waxed; the spines thrusting back from scalp and neck shone like gold, and indeed were coated with a conductive copper-chrome film. His sense organs were gathered in clusters at the site of a man's ears; his visage ... was corrugated muscle, not dissimilar to the look of an uncovered human brain.
 (The Mek from 'The Last Castle' by Jack Vance) His maw, a vertical irregular cleft at the base of this "face" was an obsolete organ by inclusion of the syrup sac which had been introduced under the skin of the shoulders; the digestive organs, originally used to extract nurition from decayed swamp vegetation and coelenterates, had atrophied... his superb brain also functioned as a radio tranceiver. |
| Technovelgy from The Last Castle,
by Jack Vance. Published by Del Rey in 1967 Additional resources -
|
The syrup sac is an ingenious device, which supplied all of the nutritional needs of the Meks without the need to grow crops, catch food, and spend time eating. Despite these advantages, the gentlefolk of the last castle on Earth did not see fit to make use of syrup sacs themselves.
This illustration of a solitary Mek is from the original publication of the novel in Galaxy:
(Mek from 'The Last Castle' by Jack Vance)
The name of these creatures is a play on the word mech, a simple robot, from Helen O'Loy (1938) by Lester del Rey.
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'Now, except for weight and heat, the same conditions prevail in this chamber as in space.'
'there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net...'
'Now, look, let's start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics...'
'..the synthetic intellects at the Place of Knowledge had far outstripped the minds of men.'
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