27 Comments on “Someone Tell Me Whose Bio-Punk Novel This World Is Turning Out to Be From, Please”

1. Wow. That really is pretty cool! Maybe I can get things like math and science in there that way too. Book lernin’ is a thing of the past.

2. I think the answer is, quite obviously: Warren Ellis’s.

3. I can just see the Doonesbury strip;

   Honey: Duke, is that cocaine you’re snorting?

   Duke: (Floating upside down ala Airplane) Of course not! Don’t talk nonsense!

   Honey: It’s just that I….

   Duke: It’s stemcells extracted from the fat of Hunter S. Thompson.

4. “No, really, officers. It’s my chemo. I just got lipo’d and they made stem cells from it for my schizophrenia.”

   [Voice in head taking over]: Don’t listen to him, man. He’s already messed all of us up after they legalized medical pot.

5. Eh, it’s best to be even more skeptical than usual with the New Scientist. I lost a lot of confidence in them after the Magical Stardrive snafu.

   If you want a mine of wacky sci-fi ideas, they’ve got you covered! Otherwise…

6. John, you may very well remember that there are worse things to acquire internally via non-optimal orifice than stem cells. (The first link in the MeFi post is down, so here’s one from the CBC).

7. Patton Oswalt has said all that needs to be said about this video:

   http://www.videosift.com/video/Patton-Oswalt-on-80-s-Heavy-Metal

   (link not even close to being SFW, as it’s Oswalt’s stand-up act, of course.)

8. Officer, put down that sharpened stake. I’m only eating these still-hot human brains in an effort to inject neural stem cells into my own brain, for purely bio-medical reasons. Be grateful that I am not taking them in anally.

9. Rudy Rucker. Gotta be Rucker. The man sounds like he’s stoned out of his mind on THC laced stem cells already.

10. Doctor Memory @ #2 beat me to it. That’s got Transmetropolitan written all over it, inside it, around it, in the general vicinity of it, and even on the memory of it.

11. Somewhere, Keith Richards is feeling very smug.

12. Rudy Rucker only ingests the brains of Mathematical Logicians, especially those obsessed with Infinity. Purely to enhance his research and university teaching, of course. I say this with the utmost respect. Even though I know who bit him in Göttingen, and also granted undead immortality to the great Emmy Noether. Long story. Can’t tell it properly without equations. Or maybe gnarly fractal graphics.

13. Third vote for Warren Ellis. With a possible assist from Grant Morrison.

14. I’m voting for Effinger, myself.

15. Well, the membrane that contains the smell nerves are a direct path from inside the nose to the brain.

    That’s how people get Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. (Well, that and swimming in dirty fresh water.) As far as I know, this (the meningoencephalitis) is still ~97% fatal. (Per a Wikipedia article)

    Great way to get microscopic aliens inside.. provided they don’t cause a fatal infection.

16. Hunter S. Thompson.

    Did the poll already close?

17. Actually this is directly out of William Gibson’s “Idoru”. The part where Colin Laney is digging up dirt on various celebrities for Slitscan and discovers somebody snorting proscribed fetal tissue.

    I remember this because the part about it being ‘proscribed’ made me think, “um. You mean there’s another kind?!”

18. Also because it’s just such a gruesome image.

19. Warren Ellis was my gut reaction too.

20. It’s Greg Egan’s bio-punk novel. Probably Quarantine (1994).

21. You just know this is how Umbrella Corp. got started, right?

22. The applicator was strictly for tyros; the jaded cognoscenti balanced the implant on the tip of their little finger, and daintily poked it up the nostril of their choice. The implant burrowed into the brain, sent out a swarm of nanomachines to explore, and forge links with, the relevant neural systems, and then went into active mode for the predetermined time …

    “Axiomatic”, Interzone #41, November 1990.

    Before going to bed, I spray the vial’s contents into my right nostril, and a heavily modified version of Endamoeba histolytica — the protozoans responsible for amoebic meningitis, amongst other delights — carry their burden of nanomachines into my brain.

    Quarantine, Century/Legend, London, 1992.

23. kuru

24. Does this mean that in 20 years 90 percent of all American currency will have traces of stem cells on it along with the traces of cocaine?

25. It’s been pointed out already, but this is in common use now for several pharmaceutical therapies. Probably the most likely-encountered is insulin, which (in addition to the well-known glycemic effects) we recently showed to be an obligatory component of hippocampal memory processes – one of the reasons, and perhaps the main one, why type 2 diabetes is associated with impaired cognitive function is reduced brain insulin signalling – and a potent modulator of cerebral metabolism.

    Yeah, it *is* my research field. Why do you ask? :)

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27. This post wins the internetz for funnest comments.

    Also: holy crap, Greg Egan reads Whatever! ::bowdown::