"They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story
terrybisson.com
terrybisson.com
Awesome to see the author has published it under a creative commons license.
Wonder how many great short SF stories people will never get to read because they are locked up under copyright without ever getting reprinted.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Cyberiad-Stanislaw-Lem/dp/B005DI94CE/r...
As a side note, if anyone is hiring for a First Contact Emergency Linguistics Squad, I am permanently available for such a position. ;)
I'd like to see your resume. So I could show it to a group of randomly selected passengers at the international terminal. And a dolphin.
This story is entitled "They're Made Out Of Meat," just as it was when I first read it over a decade ago. It is not entitled "They're Made of Meat".
Yes, I know. But if you can't understand why someone might care about the difference, dare I suggest that you're not a writer? ;)
(The story is built around this phrase; the repetitions of the refrain in your head in an incredulous voice is half the point of the story. Every syllable must be presumed to be carefully chosen, and I agree with the author's choice.)
I don't know if there's a real "who came first" in speculative fiction, but I often think Brown's ideas were truly innovative. For instance, in his 1954 (very) short story "Answer", we see the basis for Skynet, and I've been as yet unable to find an earlier instance of this idea. http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room; there was a knock on the door."
http://www.studio360.org/2011/nov/04/theyre-made-out-of-meat...
I watched a version or two on youtube after, but I think the studio360 radio version is better. My son liked it too, he was laughing.
I owe it in part to SciFi stories and books like this for shattering any chance I had of narrow-minded thinking in life, and bringing perspective to Humans as a species and our place in the cosmos.
Religion is not going to disappear because humans go to the stars, either.
Writing it differently severs any connection to god. Maybe that’s the purpose of writing it like that. It’s an exclamation that’s supposed to show surprise and astonishment, the content doesn’t matter.
My/his point was that writing "oh my god" as "ohmigod" made the alien sound like a teenage girl, not that the possible appeal to a deity had any relevance to the story.
Accept it as an adaptation, a translation. Would a боже мой! be better?
I can't find that story online, but it has a similar ending vis-a-vis the alien's decision.
danec 2 hours ago | link [dead]
Thanks for linking to this story!
I remember reading this a long, long, time ago.
I don't know where, but I did have a subscription to Omni when I was in 5th grade but that was 1986 or so. More likely I read it in the early days of the internet (pre-browser), when text was king and copyright nonexistent; when people painstakingly typed in great articles and bits of fiction like this one into the darkness of their computer screens at 2 AM.
Note to danec: if you read this, it looks like your account was flagged between ~567 and ~579 days ago. Possibly someone didn't like an article you submitted, or your URL triggered an algorithm ("business opportunities" might be in some Bayesian phrase database or something).
Challenging, funny, deeply thought-provoking. Its just the one of the best things ever. I never tire of reading it and people I tell about it come back and invariably rave about how great it is. I've had quite a few converts to the whole panoply of "speculative fiction" from their exposure to this wonderful little gem.
Brave New World, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, Gravity's Rainbow, etc. aren't usually what the label conjures up.
"Literature" is the label for works that are good enough that everyone should read them, not just genre fans. "Romance", "Sci fi", "Travel", "Crime", "Comedy", "Detective", "Drama" and so on are works that aren't good enough for everyone to read.
Of course, there's writers who hack their way into the "Literature" section by imitating the quirks of a genuine pieces of literature, or just avoiding all the other categories.
If you move from actually having a subject to making your subject a metaphor for middle-class internal conflicts, you have made the move from Genre to Lit.
I remember reading this a long, long, time ago.
I don't know where, but I did have a subscription to Omni when I was in 5th grade but that was 1986 or so. More likely I read it in the early days of the internet (pre-browser), when text was king and copyright nonexistent; when people painstakingly typed in great articles and bits of fiction like this one into the darkness of their computer screens at 2 AM.