What, Again Dangerous Visions: 'Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home', Ken McCullough
Joseph Nebus
Ken McCullough
One of my friends back in undergraduate days took some clippings
from a fern or something and put them in Mountain Dew to see if they
might survive. They did, and in fact thrived. Before long it was
prospering, and abducting dogs and small children, so he experimented
with watering down the Mountain Dew until it reached a stable,
controllable equilibrium. I don't have experiments in Little Mad
Biology like this in my past, but I imagine a fair-sized fraction of the
population does.
The protagonist in ``Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home''
has just that sort of Little Mad Biology project in mind, in this case,
the feeding of a tick, dubbed Chuck Berry, who's really quite large for
his size. Making use of a steady supply of blood from a pal in Serology
and some surgical work, he's able to grow the Chuck Berry Tick up to
being really enormously large --- the size of a pincushion, it says,
with ambitions to produce a tick the size of a dog. Either way it feels
like it deserves a capital T to me. Of course there are practical
problems to overcome; for one, ticks don't live very long, so you need a
breeding program, and that's none too easy to arrange when there's a
pincushion with a vague sense of sexual obligation trying to match with
a tick-sized tick.
In creating this gigantic Tick the protagonist starts seeing,
since the story was written in the early 70s, visions of creating a
whole new true religion, man, one overthrowing the machine and all that.
Also, since the story was written in the early 70s, the plans come
crashing to a halt because one of the characters is on drugs and takes
the uses them to be stupid.
Is this science fiction? Ken McCullough drops a mention in the
afterword that it *is* a true story. I can believe it as a general
thing; I imagine there are more people than I care to imagine right now
trying to breed the largest tick ever seen, just 'cause, and there's no
shortage of other small-scale ``let's see what we can do with lower life
forms'' projects, as mentioned above. The size of the Chuck Berry Tick
seems implausibly big to me, but what do I know about how big ticks can
actually get, particularly if it's under the care of someone who knows
something about cutting up the exoskeleton enough that the Tick can live
and not so much that it can't live.
There's the slight intrusion of the plans to build a vast new
empire of the mind based on The Tick, which is a touch odd but feels to
me like the sorts of thing slightly bored early-20s males with Little
Mad Biology projects will do. Really, if we attribute the alleged size
of The Tick to natural tall tale exaggeration --- which McCullough says
was in his mind --- then it falls out of science fiction altogether and
just becomes general literature about a moderately interesting person
who did something a little unusual. It's not bad, but, why is it here?
McCullough's afterword mentions, I'm sure to no rhetorical point
whatsoever, the influence Harlan Ellison's _A Boy And His Dog_ had on
his creating this story, and that ``If more people could get it out of
their literary pants the way Ellison and William Price Fox do, and tell
a story the way it is, they would have fewer problems in writing what
they consider to be high art (artifice?).''
DANGER LEVEL: I bet this bedbug thing in New York City
is another Young Adult Male Dingbat With Little
Mad Biology Project product.
VISION LEVEL: Outstanding vision on composing the title,
regardless of what the story's about.
NEXT: ``Epiphany for Aliens'', David Kerr.
NEAR: ``Eye of the Beholder'', Burt K Filer.
JohnFair
> ``Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home''
> Ken McCullough
> Is this science fiction? Ken McCullough drops a mention in the ...
>
> DANGER LEVEL: I bet this bedbug thing in New York City
> is another Young Adult Male Dingbat With Little
> Mad Biology Project product.
> VISION LEVEL: Outstanding vision on composing the title,
> regardless of what the story's about.
>
> NEXT: ``Epiphany for Aliens'', David Kerr.
> NEAR: ``Eye of the Beholder'', Burt K Filer.
I'd given up reading the anthology by this point mainly due to the
fact that the stories by this point seemed to have given up on any
thouht of being science fiction and were merely trying for the
ludicrous and my ability to suspend my sense of disbelief was a near
fatal casualty :-/
--
Greg Goss
> ``Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home''
> Ken McCullough
...
>forms'' projects, as mentioned above. The size of the Chuck Berry Tick
>seems implausibly big to me, but what do I know about how big ticks can
>actually get, particularly if it's under the care of someone who knows
>something about cutting up the exoskeleton enough that the Tick can live
>and not so much that it can't live.
If you capitalize "Tick", you sidetrack the conversation to one about
an 800 pound doofus in blue spandex.
The main problem in scaling up arthropods is breathing. I'm not sure
what innovations evolution came up with to circulate oxygen around
inside a footwide crab or a two foot long lobster, but they'd pretty
much have to be in the organism's genes before the "grow" experiment.
Unless you're just enlarging the blood storage chamber. In that case,
the blood would probably start rotting along the way and the legs
would collapse.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27
Joseph Nebus
>On 5 Sep, 00:46, nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ``Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home=
>''
>> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 Ken McCullough
>> ...
>> Is this science fiction? Ken McCullough drops a mention in the .=
>..
>I'd given up reading the anthology by this point mainly due to the
>fact that the stories by this point seemed to have given up on any
>thouht of being science fiction and were merely trying for the
>ludicrous and my ability to suspend my sense of disbelief was a near
>fatal casualty :-/
Well, while this has been slow going on my part, that's not been
because the stories haven't been on average science fictional enough for
me. There've been several which didn't really feel like science fiction
although most of *those* 'failed' the test on the grounds they were more
impossible-comedy stories ('With A Finger In My I', 'Tissue', that Gahan
Wilson one). I *think*, without looking it up, there've been only two
that failed as not having an adequate science fiction content, this being
one of them, and even here if one refuses to accept the idea that the
narrator might not be perfectly reliable the actual printed text purports
the creation of a Tick vastly larger than could be sustained without some
major scientific advancements ... so it may not be a very interesting bit
of possible-but-unrealized science at its core, at least to people who
aren't into bugs, it meets the basic criteria.
The stories so far have been fairly tame things, really, some
with a bit of amusing dating, but I think most of them could be placed in
a contemporary science fiction magazine without standing out too much
against the background.
--
Joseph Nebus
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Joseph Nebus
>nebusj-@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>> ``Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home''
>> Ken McCullough
>...
>>forms'' projects, as mentioned above. The size of the Chuck Berry Tick
>>seems implausibly big to me, but what do I know about how big ticks can
>>actually get, particularly if it's under the care of someone who knows
>>something about cutting up the exoskeleton enough that the Tick can live
>>and not so much that it can't live.
>If you capitalize "Tick", you sidetrack the conversation to one about
>an 800 pound doofus in blue spandex.
I know, and that was in mind, but the Tick's identity seems to
stand out enough from ordinary ticks to need some special attention.
It may not be a character, but it's certainly a presence.
>The main problem in scaling up arthropods is breathing. I'm not sure
>what innovations evolution came up with to circulate oxygen around
>inside a footwide crab or a two foot long lobster, but they'd pretty
>much have to be in the organism's genes before the "grow" experiment.
>Unless you're just enlarging the blood storage chamber. In that case,
>the blood would probably start rotting along the way and the legs
>would collapse.
Quite true objections to making an enormously large tick, and
items which the protagonist claims to have solutions for. They're not
given in much detail, although the impression is the Tick is on really
extreme life support and not living anything like a healthy lifestyle
for a tick, which is probably about as much as is wise to say. Likely
an expert could come up with some vague mechanism for keeping alive an
enormously bloated tick, with the mechanism changing as the generations
do, so better they not be specified too exactly.
--
Joseph Nebus
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Evelyn Leeper
I'm having the same feeling, but I will gamely press on....
--
Evelyn C. Leeper
The only way to write about right now is to write about
the future. --Gary Shteyngart