© 2005 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-of-meat/
This article is marked as 'retired'. The information here may be out of date, incomplete, and/or incorrect.
Terry Bisson’s short story “Made of Meat” was published in OMNI magazine in 1991, and I’ve always found it to be entertaining.
Terry Bisson is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, this particular story being a Nebula nominee. I recently contacted Terry to compliment him on the story, and he said he wouldn’t mind if we linked to the online version of the story text. It seemed appropriate, given our recent spate of human-meat related articles.
From the story:
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
The full story is provided for free on Terry Bisson’s website.
© 2005 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-of-meat/
Since you enjoyed our work enough to print it out, and read it clear to the end, would you consider donating a few dollars at https://www.damninteresting.com/donate ?
I remember reading this story when it was first printed :)
meat.
Its a pretty good story.
Interesting short story, Meat. Gotta like it. With a name like Bisson (Bison) you would figure meat would have to pop into the picture…… errrrr story some time. Sorry but it had to be said.
I once saw a flash version of the Bisson text… with aliens made out of hotdogs and hams…fantastic…
anyone got a link?
Gud strory liked it wonderfull
BrIlLiAnT!!!
absolutely marvelous :)
i read this when googling for short stories.. it was pretty cute so i went a link to all my friends. glad to know its appreciated :D
Thank you for pointing out an excellent story
There should be a sequel about them finding sentient pie.
i saw a movie on this, it was pretty gross.
This short is absolutely fantastic. Aside from the humor is also had a good indication of the assumptions we all make about life. Thank you Alan for writing about this one!
Wow. That really makes you look at lifeforms in a different perspective. I love how you guys make my meat think. And let me give props to Terry Bisson s well, way to work with the abstract. I wonder what dolphins think about us?