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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Martian Print Amoeba | ||
| An organism able to mimic consumer goods. |
Making even modern manufacturing methods obsolete.
| ...the greater economic aspects of another extraterrestrial creature, the Martian print amoeba. This august unicellular organism survived by its ability to mimic other life forms - those of its own size, specifically - and although this ability had amused Terran astronauts and UN officials, no one had seen an industrial usage until Virgil Ackerman of [Martian flap bat] guano fame had come upon the scene... he had presented a print amoeba with one of his current mistress' expensive furs; the print amoeba had faithfully mimicked it... |
| Technovelgy from Now Wait For Last Year,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Unfortunately, when the Martian print amoeba gets bored, it tends to switch back to its real form. So, a method of "fixing" the amoeba was developed:
Dick fans will recognize the Biltong life forms from his 1956 short story Pay for the Printer as well as the autofac nanorobots from his 1955 short story of the same name. All three show PKD's fascination with the seemingly infinite capacity of modern manufacturing, and the fact that the source of this cornucopia is a complete mystery to the average consumer.
The answer... consisted of killing the amoeba during its interval of mimicry and then subjecting the cadaver to a bath of fixing-chemicals which had the capacity to lock the amoeba in that final form; the amoeba did not decay and hence could not later on be distinguished from the original.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
