When we declared a new genre they laughed, but then they heard the stories...
That's right: there's a new genre in town -- meatpunk!
Embracing horror, sci fi, fantasy, and practically every other mode of literature and artistic expression, meatpunk thrums along on an irresistibly simple premise: machines made of living meat.
Picture filet mignon laced up in a corset. Now set it to shuddering, add a smokestack, and let fly with a chirpy "Toot! Toot!"
Picture meaty conduits packed with intestinal coaxial; great heart furnaces, huffing and hissing and heating homes; dialysis machines in the form of vast kidneys, saving lives...
Meatpunk stories will feature these meat machines in any number of ways, from basement experiments gone wrong in horror to sleek and steaming meat-scapes in sci fi to groaning catapults of living meat in fantasy. The possibilities are endless...
Thanks to all those at Seton Hill who plugged into Meatpunk mania last week, most notably Chris Shearer and Sheldon Higdon. A big thanks also to Coe McIninch, Gie Eldredge, Victoria Thompson (a.k.a. "Chuck Burger"), and all of those who shared ideas, added enthusiasm, and expressed interest in contributing meatpunk stories and artwork to the hypothetical Meatpunk Manifesto anthology.
I look forward to sharing meatpunk with uber-creative fun-machines like Adam Browne and Nick Cato, and getting the word out to the wonderful spec fic crowd in Australia, as well as the always twisted crowd at NECon, which I'll be attending later this month.
More to the point, I look forward to hearing from YOU -- whoever you might be, even if you've just stumbled randomly on this page during a carnivorous stupor... especially if you came here randomly, in fact. I want your questions, your ideas, your stories, your images... a deluge of grassroots meaty goodness until the steaming, pulsing giant that is meatpunk rips forth fully birthed and splits the air with an ear-shattering "TOOT! TOOT!"
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32 comments:
Meatpunk is the wave of the future, John. Spread the word!
Not just a wave, my friend, a tsunami. Keep fighting the good fight!
Yeah, yeah, Meatpunk, whatever. Who's that handsome fella off to the right in the background of that photo? He looks like a leader of men. Or maybe a malnourished shut-in who loves cats. Tough to say for sure.
"Picture filet mignon laced up in a corset." HAHAHA!!!!
MICHAEL: Good eye! Yeah, that charismatic fella is none other than my brother Michael Dell, who is both a leader of men AND a cat-loving shut-in. Thanks for dropping by the blog, my pre-meatpunk pal.
JENN: I really hope you'll draw that image sometime -- but don't forget the all important smokestack and TOOT! TOOT! Have you written your meatpunk story yet?
Hey, John: You might want to check out the story "Flow," first published in 2002, reprinted in my 2009 collection VISIONS. It's all there.
LAWRENCE: Thanks for stopping by and letting me know about "Flow". I tracked down descriptions and samples, including this excellent teaser from an article in the Pittsburgh City Paper: (Take the futuristic "Flow," whose bestiary includes machines that are actually genetically designed organisms, some of which have gone feral. Connolly's narrator sets one scene thus: "A triad of wild machines huddled on the concave pavement, their low carriages and flattened backs suggesting that their ancestors had been used for hauling loads. Like most wild things, their eyes had lost the dim submissiveness of machined intellect.")
Outstanding!
I just ordered VISIONS and look forward to reading your story, which sounds like a defining meatpunk tale. When we get this anthology together, we'll definitely look for top-notch reprints, btw. It will be important to show that this idea has been hanging around in the human psyche for a while.
Of course, how could I leave out the smokestack and TOOT! TOOT! It's going to be a brilliant work of art.
I haven't written my meatpunk story yet, but now I feel strangely compelled to...
John: Hope you like the story. Here's a little more background.
"Flow" first appeared in the sf anthology BEYOND THE LAST STAR (2002). I submitted it right at deadline, prompting a Saturday morning phone call from editor Sherwood Smith. "This is just so . . . strange!" she said (in a good way, of course).
The story garnered good notice when the book came out, and for a time I considered expanding it into a novel, but other projects got in the way.
I was glad when "Flow" came out again in VISIONS, where I was careful to include an introductory note warning readers that they were likely to find it "the strangest story in the collection."
If this meatpunk thing takes off, I might have to give the "Flow" novel another look. That would be cool.
So glad you're raising the meatpunk banner. Anything to help the cause!
Love your blog. Keep the posts coming!
Ah, Meatpunk. I need to get started on my contribution, methinks...
weird
JENN: Toot! Toot! Yes -- there's something about the meatpunk thing that produces that strange compulsion. I'm not sure what it is, exactly -- maybe the fact that it's so basic or so image-based or so uncanny or that we're both made of meat and machine-like ourselves... Not sure. But it's been really cool, hanging out with people and watching the energy wind up as their heads fill with ideas.
Can't wait to see what you come up with!
LAWRENCE: Great story about "Flow", which I'm really excited to read. It sounds like a LOT of fun... and an archetypal meatpunk story. What an exciting idea, too -- a meatpunk novel, an extrapolation of a "pre-meatpunk" story, doing its thing and defining a fun new genre. Judging by early responses to meatpunk, I think you'd have plenty of readers.
And thanks for your kind words about the blog. I was resistant to blogging and only started this one because it was required by Seton Hill instructor Scott Johnson (who has a great idea for a meatpunk story, I might add). I'm so glad I started it now. It's been great fun.
KRISTIN: Oh yes, DEFINITELY. You're a meatpunker to the bone. And how cool would it be, in the contributor notes, to say "meatpunker and Fulbright scholar"? Speaking of your scholarship and its relation to meatpunk, I hear South Koreans put pork in everything. Fellow Seton Hall WPF-er (and future meatpunker) Joe Campbell had a hard time maintaining his vegetarian diet there because of pork's ubiquitous nature. Might make for an interesting cultural meatpunk angle... particularly following your travels through Egypt, where I'm guessing pork was a little less common.
DIANE: Precisely! It _is_ weird, isn't it? But not entirely new... As evidenced by FRANKENSTEIN and countless existing stories -- see Lawrence Connolly's "Flow", for example -- the idea of meat machines occurs somewhat naturally, no matter how unnatural it may seem (and be). As we blur the lines between technology and flesh, entering what some might call the post-human age, I think meatpunk might actually sprout a pair of meaty little legs and sprint into fullness. The weirdness to which you allude is a primal, iconic weirdness agitated by our almost symbiotic relationship with machinery and technology. No -- I don't think machines are sentient and self-replicating, but the IDEA behind them, the RELATIONSHIP they share with us certainly "lives" on... and is somewhat symbiotic in that its cooperation with us encourages us to push it forward, too. All of this stuff lurks in that simple comment -- "weird" -- that, and a nice filet in a corset, of course.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by. I hope you'll at least toy with the idea of some weird little meatpunk tale.
I'm thinking of going vegetarian, and so am unsure whether this genre is right for me. I've heard of really frigid people writing romance, though, and couch potatoes writing thrillers. Hmm...will think on this subject. Whether you see my name on meatpunk or not, I applaud your creativity!
John, I have to get you that copy of SF&F with "Home Sweet Bi'ome" in it. You'll love it (but it weirded me out!). I also ran across the term "biopunk" in my reading the other day, but I can't for the life of me remember where. I was concerned Meatpunk had already been established under this other name. Is it the same thing? You might want to up the Meatpunk campaign so you have the honor of aggregating all these forthcoming stories instead of that biopunk guy!
I'm really fond of this idea, actually. There are so many possibilities--and though there have been hints of meatpunk before, I think it's time for it to burst onto the scene and take its rightful place in genre glory.
"Biopunk" sounds cool--"meatpunk" sounds badass.
One example of meatpunk that I thought of was the tyranids in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Their spaceships are biological. Their weapons are biological.
Cool stuff. I'll be waiting to hear more.
GUSHER
As befit his name, he was red. Soaked in it, head to foot.
Coots saw him and made an exclamation of alarm -- something muffled, he couldn’t quite make it out -- and Adair gave his trademark smoky laugh. “Don’t let a little blood ruffle your feathers, buddy.” At least he’d meant it to be his trademark laugh.
The blood was courtesy of the regulator on the line-12 zip collar. Capped now, scabbed with cement, along with the blowout on the main trunk. Though blowout hardly said it. It had knocked him off his feet before he’d been able to swing the hemostats in. Still didn’t feel right in the head. The well all around him, the pulse of it, the deep red din…
“What do you say, pal, time to clock off?” -- looking for the possum belly: the flow-discharge tank. Its egress hatch, always open… “Hey, Coots, you see the way out?” Coots would know. His pal, his partner. His lieutenant these thirty-two years.
No answer. Adair turned. “Buddy?” Peering into the shadows, his old friend a dim shape at the edge of the monkeyboard.
“Buddy?” Again nothing. What was the matter? Adair went to join him … though he was a bit unsure on his feet, if truth be told, and when he reached the side, Coots had to take him by the elbow in case he went over.
And it was sure a long way down. He saw guywires, and tendons, and plumbing, just like mile-long elephant trunks. Elephantskin and blonde freckled forearmskin and wet leather, and lumpy pumps made of donkey muscle. And birds, way down there, big birds, like Pacific gulls, flashing in and out of the spots the team had slung from the rough pelts of the support gear, grey and white and tan, depending from the orthopedic gantry around the rig’s unevenly striped proboscis. Which plunged like an exercise in perspective, like an exercise in down, into the Base. The Seethe.
A wet wind swelled up and blew tears from his eyes. “Well,” he said. “I declare.”
“Do you see, Red?” Coots said.
“Yeah,” Red murmured. “I see.” He was starting to remember. There was no way out.
GREAT name for a subgenre - above is my contribution - start of something meatpunkish, though I'm not quite sure what.
TOOT TOOT!
ANITA: Thanks! It's funny -- for some reason, meatpunk seems to appeal to vegetarians (and possibly those pondering vegetarianism). I believe that at least two of animated meatpunkers -- Coe and Jenn -- are vegetarians. Interesting...
JEN: I'm looking forward to the story. Great title!
Yeah, after coming home from rez, all pumped up about meatpunk, I looked into the biopunk thing. There are areas of overlap, but they're actually quite different. I'll probably post about this soon, but basically biopunk is a brainy subset of sci fi. Meatpunk is a fun subset of all genres and welcomes stories both brainy and not-so-brainy. Really, I should just defer to W.H. Horner's excellent response...
W.H.: Thanks!
You handled the biopunk / meatpunk question perfectly. I might be wrong, but I think "meatpunk" is a much more marketable name than "biopunk". Not that they're in competition; though some stories fit both classifications, biopunk is a much tighter subset. Meatpunk = machines made of meat. Simple, like the name. The fun part will be the jarring dissonance readers find between the simple, cartoonish idea and the high quality of the stories. I LOVE that sort of thing.
ADAM: Yeeessssssssss!!!
Fantastic meatpunky start, pal! Thanks so much for posting this. I knew you'd have a ball with the genre, and I can't wait to see what you do with the idea.
The meat machine here, it's what? A drilling rig? A refinery? I love-love-love the meatpunkiest paragraph. It's so loaded with great imagery, and it captures some of the "power of the sublime" inherent to genre.
So who's the main character? A roughneck? Or a lumber baron, visiting the business of someone new in the region? If the latter, will he look upon his many Venusians as they work a god-tree, their efforts coordinated like that of a superorganism, and draw the obvious parallels?
Also, I reckon you have a few great titles squirreled away in this one: "Gush", "The Deep Red Din", and "The Seethe" come to mind.
Excellent!
Multiple comments!
I just did a search for Meatpunk to link my own blog to, and this post is number 5, but the only one in the top ten that's about writing meatpunk. The rest are weird Lego things and bacon earrings. Mmm, bacon...
Also, I gave you a plus-one on Google so there's more weight to this post and therefore more credibility.
I think the grosser Meatpunk stories will inspire a wave of new vegetarians--but also, I think it will inspire people to play with the idea of meat, how gross it is, how primal, how *meaty*, whether they have veggie leanings or not. Maybe moreso if they do, since they already find meat weird.
The cover of the Manifesto better have that corseted fillet on it, or I'm gonna be *pissed*.
From my understanding, Biopunk is about genetic engineering and about creatures being made; Meatpunk is more about parts of creatures. Way more basic.
Now, about those meat-catapults...
I may be vegetarian, but I'm strangely fascinated...I'm either going to create a soypunk splinter faction or write a juicy meatpunk romance complete with filet corsets AND bacon earrings (I have to look those up, Sami!)
Sounds like a wonderful offshoot of the Bizarro movement!
May I suggest you make Francis Bacon the patron artist of Meapunk?
Here's why:
http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/?c=54-55
I've seen Bacon's "Figure with Meat" in person at the museum in Dublin. As soon as I heard Meatpunk I thought of this painting.
Enjoy!
SAMI: Thanks! You are a true meatpunker.
I appreciate your help, love your meatpunk ramblings -- couldn't agree more with the primal meaty appeal bit, by the way -- and very much look forward to reading about those meat-apults.
ELLE: Another vegetarian! Excellent!
Great point about soy... I'd love to see it come into play in a sci fi meatpunk story. I picture a kid embarrassed to pull up to the curb on the tofu scooter her parents gave her for her birthday. Sure, it _looks_ like a meat scooter, but all the kids know, don't they?
NICK: Bizarro has a reserved room in meatpunk. It should be a fun place for bizarro guys to play alongside a bunch of other writers, some of them far removed from the bizarro mindset. That's a big part of the fun, really; meatpunk's so simple, it ends up being a crazy way to bring together all of these smart, wildly different writers.
KRISTINA: Awesome painting! Thanks for the link.
I've been surprised by all the meat-based art and especially the meat-scapes that are out there. Meat's very much on the collective mind of artists, it seems; I picture a giant throbbing brain all draped in bacon...
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