| "They're Made Out of Meat" | |
| Author | Terry Bisson |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Published in | OMNI |
| Publication type | magazine |
| Publication date | April 1991 |
They're Made Out of Meat is a Nebula Award-nominated short story by Terry Bisson. It was originally published in OMNI.[1] It consists entirely of dialogue between two characters, and Bisson's website hosts a theatrical adaptation.[2] A film adaptation won the Grand Prize at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum's 2006 film festival.[3]
The two characters are sentient beings capable of traveling faster than light, on a mission to "contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe." Bisson's stage directions represent them as "two lights moving like fireflies among the stars" on a projection screen. They converse briefly on their bizarre discovery of carbon-based life, which they refer to incredulously as "thinking meat." They agree to "erase the records and forget the whole thing," marking the Solar System "unoccupied."[4]
The story was collected in the 1993 anthology Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories,[5] and has circulated widely on the Internet, which Bisson finds "flattering."[4] It has been quoted in cognitive, cosmological, and philosophical scholarship. [6][7][8]
See also[]
- Carbon chauvinism
- Roadside Picnic
References[]
- ↑ Bisson, Terry (4 1991). "They're Made Out of Meat". OMNI.
- ↑ Bisson, Terry. "They're Made out of Meat (play)". Terry Bisson SF Story Showcase. Retrieved on 2008-02-03.
- ↑ "Science Fiction Short Film Festival Winners Announced". Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (2006-02-09). Archived from the original on 2006-04-12.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Bisson, Terry. "They're Made out of Meat". Terry Bisson SF Story Showcase. Retrieved on 2008-02-03.
- ↑ Bisson, Terry (11 1993). Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories (1st (Hardcover) ed.). New York, NY: Tor. ISBN 978-0312854119.
- ↑ Boden, Margaret A. (2006). "16.v.d". Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 1386. ISBN 0199292388, http://books.google.com/books?id=nQMPIGd4baQC. Retrieved on 3 February 2008.
- ↑ Wolff, Milo (2003). "55: Cosmology, the Quantum Universe, and Electron Spin". in Richard L. Amoroso et al. (eds.). Gravitation and Cosmology: From the Hubble Radius to the Planck Scale. Fundamental Theories of Physics, Vol. 126. Netherlands: Springer. pp. 517-524. doi:. ISBN 978-1-4020-0885-6.
- ↑ McGinn, Colin (5 1999). Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN 0465014224.
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