Oz meat

[mmcirvin]

vaxzilla's user info reminded me that in L. Frank Baum's Oz books, the various sentient effigies, robots, vegetables and such refer to humans and other animals as "meat people", "meat dogs", etc.

That struck me as very cyberpunk.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

In Iain [M.] Banks' "Culture" novels, the sentient machines (Minds and drones) use the term meat as a derogatory term towards humans and other living animals. In _Excession_, one particularly twisted ship-Mind, called Grey Area, has a hobby of violating the taboo on looking into the thoughts of humans using its effectors (an electrical-field detector/disrupter which, hundreds of years after its development as a blunt weapon, is now a very precise tool even at long distance) and, along with its interest in the tools humans have used to torture each other, it looks into the heads of human war criminals (for example) and torments them with their own thoughts. The other Minds call this "meatfucking" and strongly loathe the practice. As a result, the other ship-minds avoid contact or mention of Grey Area, even listing it on official registries with the name Meatfucker.

It's not clear what term humans and other meat robots use to diss their Mind and Drone companions. If they were silicon-based, you could call them sandboxes or glass-for-brains or something like that. While it's clear from _Player of Games_ that a drone can be pissed off, it'd be hard to get the goat of a mind that's simultaneously paying attention to the rest of the people on the ship/orbital with you, which could be anything from 20 people on a Very Fast Picket ship to 50 billion people on a mostly-complete Orbital.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. Also in _Excession_ there was a drone who had his regular old brain as well as 3 emergency back up brains, each of which was slower, stored less, and higher maintenance. The last of these was a small spherical meatbrain that could store, at very slow speeds, the barest essentials of the memes that compose that drone's personality. (You can deduce from its mention of memes that the book was written in the mid to late '90s.) Unfortunately, this drone suffered a series of bad experiences (namely it was the only survivor aboard a ship that suffered a truly wierd encounter), one of which pulped its meatbrain, something the drone was happy to get rid of, since the prospect of downloading into meat wasn't much better than the prospect of death.

Last one, I promise.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Despite its informative look at the lives of Minds and drones, _Excession_ is still the least interesting of the Culture novels, perhaps precisely because most of its main characters are ship-Minds and a drone or two. It's not a bad book at all and even has a handful of superb scenes, but _Player of Games_ was way better, and _Use of Weapons_ should be in the top 25 SF books of all time-- you'll never look at chairmaking the same way again. Seriously.

Re: Last one, I promise.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sad to say, Excession is the only Culture novel I've read unless you count Feersum Endjinn, which I very much liked.

I thought Excession wasn't very good, but I've since heard that others are much better.

Also, I liked the one Banks mainstream novel I've read, The Crow Road, though it was a pretty standard coming-of-age plot.

[naqerj.livejournal.com]

The Oz books were honestly some of my favorite growing up. I still occasionally evangelize for the 13 Oz books most people haven't heard of.

I'm pretty sure the use of "meat" there is merely synonymous with "flesh" -- we just don't usually talk about eating "flesh" much any more (though at the Pascha feast, the Orthodox Church has a blessing prayer for "fleshmeats," a word I never tire of saying). I don't really have the energy to go into the living room and pull out the OED to give you a full run-down on it, so I'm mostly just guessing.

Hmmm... you people are all meat. Think of the savings!

Re: Last one, I promise.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

If you decide to work on the Culture, you'll want to start with _Consider Phlebas_ which takes place during the Idiran War, about 700-800 years before _Excession_, which has the added interesting bit of being told by a humanoid who sided with the Idirans. A good bit of its plot is referenced in the most recent book, _Look to Windward_, so you'll want to read that perhaps last.

The rest are out of print and hard to get ahold of, but the two I mentioned in above posts are worth getting, and I haven't yet read (or found) a copy of _The State of the Art_, a book of shorts stories, some from the Culture, including the story of a General Contact Unit and crew visiting Earth in 1977. (I've heard a little about this-- apparently at one point the GCU sent a postcard to the BBC requesting they play David Bowie's "Space Oddity.") There's also supposed to be one in the _Feersum Endjinn_ universe.

_Inversions_ is also a Culture-universe novel, but is set in a pair of warring kingdoms at a medieval state of technology.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Most of the non-meat creatures don't seem to be using the term derisively, but a few are-- most notably the Mangaboos, basically humanoid animate tubers who live in the center of the earth.

They're Made of Meat

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

This thread isn't really complete without a link to Terry Bisson's short story, "They're Made Out of Meat"

http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html

Okay, it's a wrap. Terry Bisson writes excellent fiction when he's not advocating freedom for Mumia, and maybe when he is, too.