Doctorow, Cory

Doctorow, Cory. "Chicken Little." In Gateways. Ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2010. "A Tor Book" festschrift in honor of Frederik Pohl. Pp. [365-410.

Uses the philosophical riff on R. Descartes of "the brain in a vat" thought experiment, an SF trope from Donovan's Brain (1942) through recent cyberpunk. More immediately, "Chicken Little" is the nickname of a large gob of biological mass grown for protein — more of less — for the masses in the world of Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, a huge mound of metastasizing biological matter that covers the entrance to an HQ of an anti-consumerism Conservationist conspiracy. In CD's story, the brain and body (parts?) in the vat are (and is) the vat-person Buhle: one among an ultra-small elite very different from you and me: a "monster," corporation, and sovereign entity; "Now they were matastatic, these hyperrich, lumps of curdling meat in the pickling solution of vast machines that laboriously kept them alive among their cancer blooms and myriad failures" (368; description: 401). The hidden conspiracy here involves "a [pharmaceutical] bioweapon that infected its victims with numeracy," specifically one that allows rational judging of risks and opportunities ("Imagine if the capital markets ran on realistic assessments of risk instead of envy, panic, and greed" [403]). Additional interesting references: one to "a massive, unknowable machine that was vying to change the world, remake it to suits its needs," not necessarily for the general good. "A machine that was good at it" (408). And "a family of dancing bears" (here 387).

3. FICTION, RDE, 03/VI/11