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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. For sure - i
by 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 agoI 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.