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"If I had to get a new Ph.D. now, I'd get it in polymer engineering - the manipulation of matter."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| 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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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
