Great Mambo Chicken & The Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis: book review

Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge (1990) is rich in hubris and forward-looking science and technology.

Regis explores the notion of fin-de-siecle hubristic mania – the desire for perfect knowledge and total control – of science organizations and individual scientists. The novel goes beyond moon landings, heart transplants, gene splicing and Evil Knieval’s canyon-crossing rocket ship to technologies that once, and still, seem miraculous and impossible.

It is a documentary novel of the prospect of immortality and of independent scientific minds that experiment and explore the impossible. These are the scientists who hate being told that they can’t do something or that something can’t be done. “The whole concept of the impossible was something of an affront to the human spirit … a slap in the face of creativity and advanced intelligence.”

And so, with all its jargon and terminology, Regis writes of cryonics, biostatic comas, neurological suspension, nanotechnology, space colonization, body transplants, tele-presence, the age of post-biological man, adaptive mutation, antigravity generators, faster-than-light travel, antimatter propulsion, space warps, time machines, solar sailing, interstellar travel, and holding the Olympic Games in space.

Mambo chickens, of the title, refer to gravity and centrifugal experiments with chickens for months on end. They lost excess body fat, their hearts pumped more blood than normal, their wing strength increased, their bones strengthened, and their muscles expanded. The chickens became “paragons of brute strength and endurance” - high-G chickens!

With extraordinary detail, fact, wit, and whimsy, Regis goes beyond everyday science with ease, keeping the reader absorbed throughout. He shows what scientists, with persistence, determination, hubris, and imagination, can achieve, and what they hope to achieve in the future. A discussion on ethics, religions, and cultures would have enhanced this amazing book even more.

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