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Your Brain is Not Your Own
A gourmet salad of original ideas served on a bed of radioactive liver sausage. A mega national corporation that has legally adopted 37 children attempts to usher in the Era of Silicon Consciousness, whereby androids will replace ALL biological life forms, and a rag-tag coalition of animals – and plants – joins forces to stop them. And then it gets REALLY interesting. Science Reality takes on the FUTURE of Evolution. And it’s funny. Funny, irreverent, politicized, mind-popping, inventive, thinking-man’s, science fiction in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut. Guaranteed to take a place on the shelf of science fiction/fantasy literary classics.
YEARS LATER, as the pirates shoved him onto the gangplank, Doctor Odysseus Tyme thought back to the day his father told him plants could talk.
The revelation of consciousness in plants had crashed the hallowed Petri dishes of Biology like a rogue comet – splattering gum agar across the desks and couches of psychologists and social scientists from Tallahassee to Tokyo – smearing their brainpans with blood nutrients, stimulating the growth of brand new thoughts. They’d made a mess of understanding humans. Why not try plants? They were simpler, more basic – weren’t they?
Almost overnight the media was deluged with pseudo-scientific reports on “Lettuce in Love” or “I was a Toxically Shamed Geranium”. One could dip into the mind of a potato discoursing on “Arrested Development in Rocky Soil” or hear why “Real Manure is the Cure” by a panel of tulips. It was a whole new mindscape.
Once scientists turned their computer-ears to the most commonly used plant frequencies they could hold running conversations with any vegetable, moss or tree. “Human Odors and Lunar Cycles” made TIME magazine, as did “The Eco-Advantages of Urinating on Your Bushes”, a fascinating portrayal of exactly how lilacs transformed pee into perfume.
Within months the new research set off an epidemic of suicides among vegetarians. For centuries they had claimed the high moral ground on the assumption that what they ate did not think or feel …In fact, by the time the full truth came out about how plants entertained emotions and modes of communication beyond the scope of human sensitivity, it was already too late…
“Do Plants Think?” was the headline in the New York Times. For ten million Americans and 900 million Hindus the angst was enormous. This was a paradigm shift of stupendous proportions. Suddenly one day you woke up and looked out your window and all you saw everywhere were eentsy green “people”.
Eating lettuce became an act of cannibalism. Nobody had yet figured out how to talk to a chicken or a mackerel, but tomatoes and cucumbers were spewing out the raciest details of their lives. You ever wondered what it was like hanging around in a bunch of bananas? Now you knew. You ever wondered what trees do? Now you knew. America was more emotionally immobilized than when the Space Shuttle blew up.
Other, older, cultures took the news in stride. Expensive European restaurants even invented sick little games of talking to your vegetables right at your table before you ate them. Aficionados said it was a more intimate experience than eating live monkey brains in Bangkok.
And then, of course, came the backlash. When one enterprising young journalist pointed out how large the trees grew around cemeteries the Washington Post clamored, “Do Plants Eat Us?” What a question.
Senators, congressmen and pop-scientists, choked the airwaves with dippy proclamations and florid nonsense, stoking the engines of publicity and confusing everybody within electronic earshot. And then the draft horses of academia put on their overalls and went to work. Real work. Out of the Petri dishes and back into the bushes they went, knee deep in mud – botanists, zoologists, journalists, and ozone-brained mushroom-eaters – vying with each other, spying on plants, spying on each other, each hoping to nab a breakthrough. It didn't take long...
YEARS LATER, as the pirates shoved him onto the gangplank, Doctor Odysseus Tyme thought back to the day his father told him plants could talk.
The revelation of consciousness in plants had crashed the hallowed Petri dishes of Biology like a rogue comet – splattering gum agar across the desks and couches of psychologists and social scientists from Tallahassee to Tokyo – smearing their brainpans with blood nutrients, stimulating the growth of brand new thoughts. They’d made a mess of understanding humans. Why not try plants? They were simpler, more basic – weren’t they?
Almost overnight the media was deluged with pseudo-scientific reports on “Lettuce in Love” or “I was a Toxically Shamed Geranium”. One could dip into the mind of a potato discoursing on “Arrested Development in Rocky Soil” or hear why “Real Manure is the Cure” by a panel of tulips. It was a whole new mindscape.
Once scientists turned their computer-ears to the most commonly used plant frequencies they could hold running conversations with any vegetable, moss or tree. “Human Odors and Lunar Cycles” made TIME magazine, as did “The Eco-Advantages of Urinating on Your Bushes”, a fascinating portrayal of exactly how lilacs transformed pee into perfume.
Within months the new research set off an epidemic of suicides among vegetarians. For centuries they had claimed the high moral ground on the assumption that what they ate did not think or feel …In fact, by the time the full truth came out about how plants entertained emotions and modes of communication beyond the scope of human sensitivity, it was already too late…
“Do Plants Think?” was the headline in the New York Times. For ten million Americans and 900 million Hindus the angst was enormous. This was a paradigm shift of stupendous proportions. Suddenly one day you woke up and looked out your window and all you saw everywhere were eentsy green “people”.
Eating lettuce became an act of cannibalism. Nobody had yet figured out how to talk to a chicken or a mackerel, but tomatoes and cucumbers were spewing out the raciest details of their lives. You ever wondered what it was like hanging around in a bunch of bananas? Now you knew. You ever wondered what trees do? Now you knew. America was more emotionally immobilized than when the Space Shuttle blew up.
Other, older, cultures took the news in stride. Expensive European restaurants even invented sick little games of talking to your vegetables right at your table before you ate them. Aficionados said it was a more intimate experience than eating live monkey brains in Bangkok.
And then, of course, came the backlash. When one enterprising young journalist pointed out how large the trees grew around cemeteries the Washington Post clamored, “Do Plants Eat Us?” What a question.
Senators, congressmen and pop-scientists, choked the airwaves with dippy proclamations and florid nonsense, stoking the engines of publicity and confusing everybody within electronic earshot. And then the draft horses of academia put on their overalls and went to work. Real work. Out of the Petri dishes and back into the bushes they went, knee deep in mud – botanists, zoologists, journalists, and ozone-brained mushroom-eaters – vying with each other, spying on plants, spying on each other, each hoping to nab a breakthrough. It didn't take long...
840 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2002
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