The Most Horrible Breakfast In Science Fiction
I intended to review The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin but I am going to have to resign myself to the fact this isn’t happening. Before I throw my notes away, however, here is the source of a reference to page 78 which just says “horrible breakfast”:
He was not the thin, sharp-boned man he had been in the world of the seven billion; he was quite solid, in fact. But he ate a starving man’s meal, an enormous meal – hard-boiled eggs, buttered toast, anchovies, jerky, celery, cheese, walnuts, a piece of cold halibut spread with mayonnaise, lettuce, pickled beets, chocolate cookies – anything he found on his shelves. After this orgy he felt physically a great deal better.
Everything Is Nice 
I haven’t read The Lathe of Heaven in so long that I don’t remember the horrible breakfast, but … boy, it only seems to really go off the rails as a meal around when the halibut gets into the act. (I understand there are people who eat anchovies on purpose, so I’ll give that a pass.)
The seven-billion person world was the horribly overcrowded one, wasn’t it? It’s kind of amusing how every science fiction author places the “impossibly overcrowded” Earth at about three times the Earth’s population when the author was ten.
Joseph Nebus
9 May 2012 at 02:54
For some reason I am reminded of the incessant feasts in Brian Jacque’s Redwall novels. I was always troubled as a child by the idea of mice and their friends cooking up other sapient woodland creatures. There was never a clear dividing line between the beasties that talked and those that were, you know, safe to put on display at opulent banquets.
ShaunCG
9 May 2012 at 13:31