“The Featherless Chicken” is the elusive goal of the researchers in Patrick Scott Vickers’s lab. As his narrator tells us, “Two year ago my team’s chicken number fourteen came out of the incubator screaming. You could hear it from one end of the lab to the other. Our idea had been to have the chicken’s sweat glands secrete acid so the feathers would naturally burn off. Feathers are tougher than you might think. Even though there was a slight overproduction of acid, the feathers held on, and the acid actually cooked the skin a little, making it real crispy. At the Progress Report I mentioned how the crispy skin could probably be added to team three’s Pre-Cooked Chicken, and so Chicken Fourteen wasn’t a Total Failure.”

Perhaps this reviewer might be seen as humorlessly pedantic if she points out that birds have no sweat glands and that featherless chickens have already been produced by the simple expedient of selective breeding. Vickers is not, after all, attempting realistic science fiction in this piece. It is absurdist fantasy, with the Cow Team hard at work on the Clear Cow, entirely translucent except for the digestive system, “to watch from the time the cow gets the grass in her mouth all the way to the shit.” On the other hand, perhaps it is not too much for us to ask that the author could do just a little, just the slightest bit of the most basic research on his subject. The ethical issues involved are certainly real enough, a worthy target for satire, but for readers to take Vickers’ point seriously, it would help if we were able to believe he knows something of what he is writing about.