Tuesday 27 June 2017

Feast Before Seidh

SM Stirling, The Sword Of The Lady (New York, 2009), Chapter Seventeen, p. 499ff.:

potato soup;
braised red cabbage;
potatoes prepared in half a dozen ways;
moosemeat tortiere;
ale;
mead.

Since food has become a major sub-theme, here are some observations on it:

cook is an important position in a Buddhist monastery;
a few people claim to live without eating;
are they all fakers or is there a rare physical condition that would allow for this?;
it would change everything if everyone were able to do it.

Sf idea: an intelligent race able to get all the energy it needs from air and sunlight.

(i) Ythrians are canivores but also super-charge themselves by pumping oxygen into their bloodstreams. Would an improved super-charger system enable them to dispense with eating?

(ii) Kryptonian body cells store and maximally use solar energy, bestowing enhanced strength, speed, flight and visual powers and making eating an enjoyable extra, not a necessity. Is this feasible?

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I don't think anyone with PHYSICAL bodies can live long without food, at least minimal amounts of food. So I would say people who claim to no longer eat are faking it.

Hmmm, an intelligent race getting the energy it needs from air and sunlight alone does not seem very plausible.

And Ythrians need LARGE amounts of meat precisely because of the supercharger pumping more oxygen to their blood. And a ramped up supercharger would seem to INCREASE their need for food.

Sean

David Birr said...

Paul and Sean:
Jack Chalker, in his *Well World* series, had a scene of a man (with "A God Am I" sort of ambitions) planning to have his body restructured for greater effectiveness ... while still looking fully human. One change he intended was to include a chlorophyll analogue in his skin; it might not provide ALL he needed from sunlight alone, but it'd supplement normal food and drink, possibly enough to make up for the heightened metabolism some of his other improvements would require.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID!

Kind of like the "biomods" we see Stirling's Draka being done for them in THE STONE DOGS.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Neil Gaiman's BLACK ORCHID has artificially generated plant people.