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Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things. The humor is ba

Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things. The humor is based on our human notion of some arbitrary superiority over other beings on our planet and our expectation of being treated as equals by other species who may in fact view us as something more like talking slime mold. Regarding the wikipedia/dictionary definition of meat including the idea of it being food for the ET characters, I believe you may be reading too much into the denotation and not the connotation held by the word (which you acknowledge, but not, I feel, with the weight the author intended).

svara 6y ago
> Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things. For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.
- shawnz 6y ago
  I don't think "biological tissue" works either. The aliens are living things, so isn't their tissue biological by definition (no matter what it is made of)?
- webmaven 6y ago
  > For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it. If we extend the setting a bit such that multicellular life is vanishingly rare, you could replace "meat" with "scum", and add a few more lines about mobile chunks of scum, chunks reproducing by extruding a smaller mobile chunk, chunks of scum growing by absorbing other chunks and then inefficiently breaking them down to the molecular level and building more scum from scratch instead of just repurposing the absorbed scum, thinking maybe the planet is intelligent with an adjunct distributed network of chunky-scum-based manufacturing, storage, and compute units, etc.

svara 6y ago

> Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things. For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.

shawnz 6y ago
I don't think "biological tissue" works either. The aliens are living things, so isn't their tissue biological by definition (no matter what it is made of)?
webmaven 6y ago
> For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it. If we extend the setting a bit such that multicellular life is vanishingly rare, you could replace "meat" with "scum", and add a few more lines about mobile chunks of scum, chunks reproducing by extruding a smaller mobile chunk, chunks of scum growing by absorbing other chunks and then inefficiently breaking them down to the molecular level and building more scum from scratch instead of just repurposing the absorbed scum, thinking maybe the planet is intelligent with an adjunct distributed network of chunky-scum-based manufacturing, storage, and compute units, etc.