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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap

367 statements
67 feature instances
30 referencing feature instances

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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	label	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	comment	In many near-future dystopian science fiction settings, prices on some items, particularly natural things created by natural processes, are quite high, as opposed to mass-produced via synthetic processes. This is particularly the case if the setting is specifically shown to be one of severe environmental degradation, where agriculture is difficult, natural foodstuffs are unsafe, most natural-born animals are extinct, and resources are stretched so thin that raising something as superfluous as a live animal in your house is madness. Either way, people just take it for granted that certain things are not to be had for regular folks, or that if they are, they're grown in batches in laboratories or, in the case of animals, may be machines designed to look like the real thing. This trope typically occurs when one character encounters an object, usually food or an animal, and questions the owner about it. They may ask "Is this real?" to which the owner of a synthetic item/cloned animal replies "Of course not." That, or, if the character is meant to be fabulously wealthy and a wee bit eccentric, they'll say "Of course." Normally, this can be written off as Artistic License â€“ Biology. Making more of themselves is something that living things tend to be pretty good at, so supply isn't an issue. Moreover, you'd be surprised at how little energy animals need to survive. The human body, assuming one does not engage in constant strenuous activity, burns up an average 100 watts of power. You have appliances in your home that consume several times that amount of power. And keep in mind, most animals — particularly reptiles such as in the page quote — run on even less than that. One of the reasons for this is cellular respiration being able to convert 40% of glucose's chemical energy into ATP. It doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind most top-of-the-line internal combustion engines struggle to convert just 30% of octane's chemical energy into motion. Animals are very efficient. However, this trope can be justified if pollution or disease have directly attacked the remaining real organisms' fertility. For agricultural products, it may be further explained by an economy of scale — once most people switch to the cheaper synthetic product, the real thing becomes even more expensive because it's made in smaller quantities. Moreover, plants are one of the few instances where life is quite inefficient given that Rubisco, the enzyme in charge of photosynthesis, is extremely slow and lacks specifity. Even modern photovoltaic cells are more efficient than plants.note Though the comparison isn't entirely fair as solar panels don't have to synthesize sugar. See also Extinct in the Future, Future Food Is Artificial, Common Place Rare, Black Market Produce, Mundane Luxury. A counterpart is Worthless Yellow Rocks; both can exist in the same work.
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	fetched	2024-03-10T23:46:21Z
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_10d303a2	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_10d303a2	comment	In Shin Megami Tensei IV, genuine meat and vegetables in Tokyo are extremely expensive due to their rarity and are eaten mainly by high-ranking organized crime bosses. This is because the people of Tokyo averted a complete annihilation of humanity because a Japanese god shielded Tokyo from the destruction but left Tokyo completely covered in a stone dome. With no light, vegetables must be grown using artificial light in special greenhouses, and there are no farm animals left so whatever meat remains has been kept frozen the entire time Tokyo has been under the dome. Meanwhile, demons are running loose in Tokyo's streets—their meat is what the normal citizens of Tokyo have been eating.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_135f4195	comment	A variant happens in Dune when a Fremen representative spits on the table during their first meeting with House Atreides. One of the protagonists gets angry and tries to draw a weapon to repay the "slight", but Duke Leto stops him - the act was a gesture of respect, as water is incredibly scarce on Arrakis. Leto's horrified to learn of the many demeaning customs his rivals the Harkonnens instituted during their rule of Arrakis based on wasting water; upon entering the palace, guests ceremonially splash water on the floor for servants to mop up with towels, who then sell the squeezings to the poor. They planted date palms everywhere, then put up Deflector Shields to keep peasants from eating the dates. Some of Leto's first rulings upon taking residence are to have the palms removed and for free water rations to be available to anyone who calls on the holding during mealtimes. It's a pragmatic move on his part as well as humanitarian, as it ensures that the people of Arrakis support his rule.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_13d88835	comment	Cowboy Bebop (2021): A downplayed version in "Callisto Soul". As Jet Black isn't interested in the algae-soy hybrid meal, he tries to order a couple of rib-eye steaks using a 2-for-1 coupon, only to be told the coupon doesn't apply to "real meat". In "Blue Crow Waltz", even a Syndicate capo complains about not being able to get real beef. Because only the rich could afford to take their pets with them during the Homeworld Evacuation, dogs are worth between 20 to 30 million woolongs. When Jet tries to give Ein to his daughter as a pet, his ex-wife puts her foot down as they can't afford to pay the tax. In fact their rarity actually makes it difficult to sell them on the black market.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_1bd71620	comment	Fray. It's difficult to be a Vampire Slayer in a future where there's a shortage of natural wood for stakes.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_1c34acd2	comment	Rocketship Voyager While at the messdeck, Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres have to eat yeast-based protein as the meat vats and hydroponics garden are still being repaired. Later Captain Janeway invites Chakotay for a formal dinner at the officer's wardroom and they have beef and vegetables from the ship's stores, though the taste is a bit off from the irradiation used to preserve it for space travel. Janeway is surprised when she attends a luxurious banquet on an alien space station and finds their alien hosts are serving up fresh meat. The beef cattle used to provide Janeway's Fancy Dinner are on Mars as all the arable land on Earth outside the megacities has been converted to food crops. Coffee and tobacco are only available (albeit at expensive prices) because the people working for the agrifood corporations must have coffee and cigarettes as well.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_1e7a4489	comment	In Clover, one character owns an organic cat but disguises it as a robot so people won't steal it.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_22b1cd38	comment	In Mamoru Oshii's Avalon, the wealthy (compared to the abject poverty of her fellow players) Ash feeds her dog quality food, as contrasted to the gruel that her peers survive on.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_24a18ffe	comment	In The Ship Who... synthesizer technology is advanced enough to create most things people need or want. Meat and plants grown outside of hydroponics are common enough on planets that produce them but a sign of great luxury in space. An expensive restaurant in The City Who Fought, a station far away from any habitable worlds, boasts not just real meat but wooden furniture. One of the missions that Nancia considers taking is transporting a bull bison to a zoo on another world that has cow bison. The hassle of moving the big animal without harming him is considerable, but these are very rare animals.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_2b2e94b6	comment	In the distant galaxy of Kin-Dza-Dza, one of the transplanted Earthlings discovers that the wooden matchsticks he's carrying in his pocket are actually the most valuable things in the system, as every last scrap of naturally-occurring organic or mineral material had long since been converted into one kind of fuel or another. Water is bought by the drop, and food is made of plastic.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_2ba1d958	comment	The Matrix: All the food that isn't gruel is virtual. This is why, in The Matrix Reloaded, some Zionites give Neo bread as a sign of admiration. It's the equivalent of giving him gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_2f4271ed	comment	In The Naked God, one character proudly shows off his 20th-century lava lamp, now a priceless and beautiful antique instead of a tacky room decoration.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_310d6df7	comment	Stand Still, Stay Silent: Inverted. A spare part for a mechanical vehicle can cost as much as a healthy workhorse, resulting in mechanical vehicles being used only by the military while civilians go around in horse-drawn carriages. Supplementary material has also mentioned sugar to have become quite expensive.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_32066b8e	comment	In V for Vendetta, Evey expresses amazement that V has access to real butter. He stole it from a shipment meant for the prime minister.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_36ee2abe	comment	Paranoia: With most of society living in a massive underground supercity, real food grown in hydroponic gardens are considered a rare luxury, and are distributed according to security clearance. Infrareds get nothing, Reds get real food as a reward, and so on up; it isn't until Blue that a clone gets nothing but real food. Petbots are often mentioned in the game, as Alpha Complex is not designed to allow for real pets. Some books mention high programmers own real animals in private zoos.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_38c87187	comment	Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: In one theoretical future, advertisements generate revenue by annoying their customers into paying a fee to skip the ad. Marketing loses sight of the greater goal and creates increasingly annoying troll-adverts that pervade into regular advertising, dooming any product that needs adverts of any kind. As a result, mass-produced basic needs are extremely cheap, but any luxury (including ketchup) is near-impossible to find and costs trillions of dollars. Humanity backslides into a dystopian mass-produced subsistence life as all media and art is repurposed to torment its viewers. Of course, the punchline is that humans still pretend bad media is entertaining and funny.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_3fbd173e	comment	Freefall takes place on a planet being Terraformed, so organics are worth considerably more than gold or diamonds. Sam once remarks that if interstellar travel weren't so expensive he could become very rich trading trash between Jean and his primitive homeworld.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_408937d5	comment	In Waterworld, potted plants and the soil to grow them in are considered valuable trade goods, as are non-sea-derived materials such as paper.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_40e44a7a	comment	"Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment, and okay for you!"
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_40eb68d8	comment	In Honorverse this is played on a more meta scale â€” food is, for the most part, neither scarce nor artificial, but the peculiarities of the hundreds of different biospheres, their interplay with the human-brought species, not to mentions various genetic tweaks made to them so they may prosper in their new homes, make sure that some commodities will pretty much always remain rare and coveted. For example, the genuine Terran whiskey is considered a rare and expensive treat even on Manticore (which is one jump and three days away from the Earth), and while celery is widespread and largely consistent over the many inhabited worlds, only a Sphinxian one contains the "telepathy vitamin" coveted by the native sentient species. The 'cats actually have the other, native source of that, but the celery is just much tastier.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_40ed68a0	comment	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novella upon which Blade Runner was based, goes into this trope in more detail than the film. Real animal pets are considered the ultimate status symbol, and new editions of a blue book are published listing each species's going rate. Many species are thought to be extinct. The main character owns an electric sheep but conceals the fact that is artificial. At the end of the book, he discovers a toad, thought to be extinct, and thus priceless, but it turns out to be artificial as well.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_41963414	comment	The War Against the Chtorr. When the government wants to hire the luxury airship Hieronymus Bosch, they have to use chocolate (among other things like coffee, oil, or gold) in payment as money is becoming increasingly valueless.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_4bf9cc7b	comment	Inverted in Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling, when the protagonists have a long gripe session about all the delicious junk food they miss, now they've been reduced to growing food naturally.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_4c467f43	comment	Similarly, oysters were once the food of the poor in Britain (though still considered a treat). Noah Claypole the "charity-boy" in Oliver Twist eats a large quantity.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_544fb5a2	comment	Although the future depicted in the In Death series is not especially dystopian, soy and vegetable imitation foods are very common, and it is a mark of Roarke's Impossibly Cool Wealth that he always drinks real coffee, smokes real tobacco, and eats real beef. The coffee in particular is insanely expensive and is made much of by Eve and her fellow cops.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_59402950	comment	In Quozl by Alan Dean Foster, the titular aliens live aboard a Generation Ship, and as such value wood considerably. It's not rare on the planets they have colonized, but space travel takes decades and growing trees in such an environment is impractical. They have elaborate public wooden sculptures, but the most wood an individual Quozl is likely to own is a small ring.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_5bb3aaab	comment	In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Togusa asks Batou if his basset hound is a clone, remarking that the real thing (as though a clone is any less real) is expensive. (Batou also feeds his dog real food, but this is not presented as an issue of cost, but one of taste.) Ghost in the Shell is set in a world recovering from war, not (demonstrably) one with a thoroughly devastated environment, however, so the trope borders on cliche here. Of course, in a world where cybernetics and androids are so plentiful, it could be that some people keep robotic pets that don't have the living and training needs of a real live one.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_5cb3196f	comment	Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, in which one of the phyles bases its entire economy on providing luxurious hand-made goods for the Neo-Victorian elite, while everything else is produced in matter compilers. The Title Drop is that diamond is now one of the cheapest materials you can have (because, being the absolute simplest pattern of the most common solid atom - a lattice of carbon - it's the easiest thing your matter compiler can make) but glass is a luxury good. The idea here is that the goods themselves are not important, but hand-made goods are valuable because they prove that you have enough power to compel another human being to take time out of their limited existence to make things for you when you could have just gone to the nearest matter compiler and got the equivalent product with a snap of your fingers.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_60156176	comment	In the Vorkosigan universe, this applies to some planets but not others. The heroine of the first two novels is from Beta Colony, a high tech but barely habitable desert planet, who winds up on Barrayar, which has a breathable atmosphere, lots of running water, and trees all over the place, but is also socially and politically and to some extent technologically backwards on account of having been cut off from contact with the rest of the galaxy for a few centuries (only ending a couple of generations before the action of the books). She has to remind herself that on this planet things like wooden buildings and furniture mean poverty, not wealth.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_6196490	comment	Ghost in the Shell: In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Togusa asks Batou if his basset hound is a clone, remarking that the real thing (as though a clone is any less real) is expensive. (Batou also feeds his dog real food, but this is not presented as an issue of cost, but one of taste.) Ghost in the Shell is set in a world recovering from war, not (demonstrably) one with a thoroughly devastated environment, however, so the trope borders on cliche here. Of course, in a world where cybernetics and androids are so plentiful, it could be that some people keep robotic pets that don't have the living and training needs of a real live one. In the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, the robotic Tachikomas regard all-natural motor oil as a real treat, much better than synthetic oil. Batou treating "his" Tachikoma differently from the rest, by regularly treating it to natural oil, is a catalyst for the robots developing individuality and self-awareness. That and the anomalies caused by the oil corroding part of its circuit board.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_66394ca4	comment	Neuromancer has a scene where Molly chastises Case for not eating his steak;
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_6a8aff51	comment	A minor example in The Stormlight Archive. One of the reasons why the gemstones used as currency in the setting are so valuable is that they are the only thing that cannot be created by Soulcasters.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_6ac55ec7	comment	In past editions of Dungeons & Dragons which include the Elemental Plane of Air in their cosmology, dirt is considered a valuable commodity on that plane, as it's made up of gas-filled space. Anyone who wants to build a floating castle must either import some dirt to build it on or (more cheaply) use magic to solidify a cloud for a foundation.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_70814599	comment	Stargate SG-1 has an odd example. A Big Eater Goa'uld is unfamiliar with and can easily be bribed by foods he's never heard of... like chicken and turkey. We don't know much about the ecology of most planets in the galaxy, but apparently the Transplanted Humans that make up 90 percent of all aliens didn't take any fowl with them.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_791fca44	comment	BioShock. The city of Rapture, being entirely underwater, does not contain enough farmland for growing nonessential crops or raising cattle, so real beef and tobacco aren't available except through Fontaine's smuggling operation. Somehow, Rapture's scientists have managed to synthesize both from what they do have on hand, which seems to be mainly sea life, and it's implied that customers generally don't mind. One of the splicers complains about the quality of a steak she's found, though given the setting it's probably rotten by that point.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_7cf5a07	comment	Eobard Thawne mentions in the season 1 finale of The Flash (2014) that in the 22nd century, cows have become extinct, which explain his love of burgers in the 21st century.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_7fcbd3e	comment	In the Mystara D&D supplement "The Shadow Elves", the subterranean elf city's grandest and most-admired public avenue is lined by a dozen or so small trees, grown from precious cuttings brought down from the legendary surface and provided for with fertilizer and artificial lights. Elven tourists come hundreds of miles through twisted tunnels and caverns just to see them.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_82ff90e9	comment	An interesting non-sci-fi example appears in Erich Maria Remarque's famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front. One of the soldiers in the story is overjoyed when he discovers an actual cherry tree in bloom during a march across the countryside to a new position. Since he (and the others) have spent entire weeks on the western front of World War I, this is hardly surprising - the frontline being a lifeless war-torn muddy wasteland and all. And the less said about the rations given to soldiers in the latter parts of the war, the better...
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_84d455d4	comment	In one episode of The Big O, pet animals are in fact so rare that everyone is quite shocked when Dorothy finds a cat. The owners come and take it back despite how attached Dorothy has gotten because it's really their son. A mad scientist turns people into animals because they're so incredibly rare. Or something. Later, it gets turned into a giant monster. They're that rare, apparently.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_861940f0	comment	There's a worldwide drought in The Silent Sea and the older characters speak with nostalgia about the joy of rain and swimming pools. Water is rationed and The Captain takes on the mission to get a higher water classification for his sick daughter.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_9045b1b7	comment	World War Z featured this when Arthur Sinclair was trying to negotiate with cattle ranchers to use their land to grow much-needed crops - they agreed only if their breeding stock remained untouched. It's a point only because the Solanum virus is fatal to all life, but only cause humans to turn into zombies. For anything else, it's just fatal and results in their flesh becoming unsafe for human consumption.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_91209b29	comment	In Xenosaga, we view one of Ziggy's memories in which he gives his son a robotic dog as a pet, as he was regretfully unable to obtain a real one.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_95226eb6	comment	Cyberpunk 2020 plays this straight. Fresh food is an expensive commodity, only within the reach of rich people, and most of the population lives eating Kibble (a mass-produced food identical in all respects to the pet food that gives it its name) and what is basically artificial food not much better than Kibble. (Live) pets, short of wild animals, are expensive too, and one of the Chromebooks even features one corporation whose business follow the lines of pay-us-and-we-bring-you-the-animal-you-wants, even if it has to be stealing it from someone or worse.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_95f45f6b	comment	Shadowrun Returns: In Dragonfall Altug sells real Turkish coffee for 50 nuyen a pop at his cafÃ©, as opposed to soykaf at 5 nuyen. He explains that it is a special blend which even in a time when "real" coffee was everywhere would be considered a rare delicacy.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_9853ddab	comment	In The Adventures of Pluto Nash, the events of the film take place on the Moon. Certain items are hard to come by on the Moon and aren't cheap to have delivered from Earth, the most commonly mentioned being wood (not the stuff used in cheap Real Life furniture, but actual wood). At one point, a mobster is mentioned by someone to have had a briefcase made of genuine alligator skin. Naturally, this immediately outed him as an Earther.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_aaa65d7e	comment	In Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0, this trope is played straight when the kids get shown a giant aquarium where specimens of pre-2nd impact sea life are preserved. Rei muses that they are the same as her and can't live outside this sheltered environment. Also, the fact that synthetic meat is the norm. The sheer dissonance between the kid's bewilderment at their first time seeing sea life, and Kaji and Misato's painful memories of the 2nd impact (Misato did not want to come because she would remember the event; Kaji wanted the kids to know what life was before 2nd impact), makes for a very dramatic moment as the viewer realizes this trope is in full effect. Slice of life and backstory exposition and character drama all rolled into one. At one point in the series, Misato thinks that buying the EVA pilots a steak dinner would bankrupt her. Realizing this, they take her to a fast-food place instead. This becomes Fridge Logic when one realizes that she works for the most important and powerful organization in the world, has precisely two superiors... yet four steaks would wipe her out. If steak is that rare, is there anyone who can afford it?
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_b0b9a2d1	comment	In Rise of the Dragon, set in the distant future, Blade Hunter must calm down his angry girlfriend by giving her flowers. To do this, he spends $200 plus tax to buy "Organically Grown Roses."
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_b2edd00b	comment	Inverted in Zombieland, where the drive of one of the main characters is to find a stash of Twinkies. After all, plants still grow after a zombie apocalypse, but with the Hostess kitchen shut down, snack cakes become an endangered species.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_b559156	comment	Schismatrix is set in a future founded by refugees of an ecological meltdown on Earth. Outside of cockroaches, most animals are extremely rare, and in certain places, the same goes for food that isn't artificial.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_baf3bcd7	comment	All material goods are scarce in Wraith: The Oblivion since the Underworld is a quasi-real interstitial state of being that was never meant to host a civilization or a significant population. Most of what there is are either fading memories of real items and buildings or goods fabricated by soulforging Wraiths into Human Resources. A very small number of living things and "natural" resources exist that cannot be explained by one of these two phenomena, all of which are staggeringly rare and valuable. For instance, the Deathlords of Stygia have a small number of apparently-living horses in their personal guard - no one knows where they came from, but Stygian policy is that their survival is more valuable than that of their riders.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_bbcd4e9b	comment	Since the sun will turn anyone without proper protection into stone in Digital Devil Saga 2, this makes any plants you find quite valuable.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_bc18062d	comment	In Anne of Green Gables, chicken was served as a special meal for important guests, and "eating chicken with salad every day" was a part of imagined upper-class life listed among diamond jewellery and silk dresses.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_bcadd7cb	comment	Warhammer 40,000: Depends on the planet. Most forge worlds have ruined their environments to the point that life barely exists outside controlled habitats and food needs importing, while hive worlds might have decent environments but the average citizen will never see the outside and live entirely on artificial foods. Agricultural worlds, on the other hand, can invert this trope, with many having abundant plant and animal life but very little in the way of technological goods (although those that are close to other planets or particularly rich might avoid this). The Dark Eldar apply this to birthrates: Their population is billions-strong, but most of it consists of vat-grown individuals called Halfborn who supply most of the soldiery (slave labor is provided by slaves, which is why they're always out raiding other species). Trueborn are the upper class, being born the biological way (due to the danger of Slaanesh claiming their souls during sex, the luxury of safety needed to carry a child to term, and because the Dark Eldar wouldn't be the Dark Eldar if they didn't have an entire strata of society to look down on / plot to overthrow).
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_bcb32dc6	comment	In Shadowrun, the in-character "shadowtalk" interspersed through the sourcebooks occasionally contains remarks like "I've never once had a real steak". Everyone but the ultra-rich evidently lives on cultured fungal protein and krill. Synthetic leather and tobacco products are also standard, as is "soycaf" instead of coffee. Inadvertently gets a laugh in the Tir Tairngire sourcebook when it's mentioned that the elves have somehow re-created extinct species for their wilderness areas. It's funny in that both of the named species, grizzly bears and gray wolves, are not only still alive and well today without any magical or cloning assistance, but they would have had to go extinct, all over the world and also in captivity, in less than a decade after the supplement was published, in order to meet the timeline suggested for their "extinction". Also, depending on wording, it's unlikely that the species Canis lupus ever went extinct in captivity, unless the setting is also completely devoid of dogs, since technically domestic dogs are a subspecies of gray wolves.note To be fair, the reclassification of Canis familiaris was fairly recent, and after thousands of generations of human-controlled breeding, dogs no longer look or act much like their wild cousins. Still, they are interfertile and are currently considered the same species. Taken to the point that a Running Gag was to mention things like Imitation Cheese Substitute. Fourth Edition cuts back considerably on this. Sure, your average shadowrunner is still subsisting mostly on soy, but you can still find most of what you'd see in RL 2011 in the shops of Shadowrun 2070 for not much more than the equivalent price. It's just that most shadowrunners are in a state of Perpetual Poverty.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_c18bfdae	comment	In the Video Game tie-in to the Blade Runner movie, the player character Ray has an artificial dog named Maggie you can play with, and the crime Ray was initially investigating involves the slaughter of several real animals including a rare tiger. Then it gets complicated: the shop owner was selling fakes but fudging records and tests so they were considered 'true' (and more expensive) animals It's noted in the game and novel that animal life is held in higher regard than humans — considering Crystal's reaction is nearly identical to walking in on a murder of a child. There is also a point in the game where McCoy mentions that cheese is a black market item, whose illegal distribution evidently comes with jail time.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_c2297a9c	comment	The vast majority, if not all, of food in Judge Dredd falls into one of three categories: Animals that we would not normally consider food like rat, as most domestic animals seem to be extinct, extremely mutated plants (this is the source of most meat) that can grow in the toxic environment of cursed earth or make entirely of chemicals. "Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment, and okay for you!"
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_c399cd39	comment	Eclipse Phase takes place after a hurried evacuation of Earth and colonization of the rest of the solar system. Naturally grown food, especially meat, is expensive due to the shortage of inhabitable space, but culture vats and nanofabricators can produce substitutes that snobs insist they can detect - but it's compared to modern-day wines. Now organic bodies, those are expensive because they take three years to grow and there's a lot of demand from the billions of Virtual Ghosts in storage, while most Synthmorphs can be printed out in a matter of hours.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who: In an inorganic variant, a bandit chieftain in the story "The Creature from the Pit" was once seen to wax rhapsodic about the amazing treasures his group has stolen: precious items of iron, zinc, and even nickel! Needless to say, this scene takes place on a Metal-Poor Planet, where only members of the elite who got them by robbing and betraying an inoffensive alien ambassador can boast such prizes. In "The Sun Makers", Gatherer Hade is shown to be one of the richest members of the evil company that controls a dystopian society on Pluto by his having a desk made of real mahogany. The member of the oppressed underclass who admires it has only seen a picture of a tree, and even the Gatherer himself mispronounces it "ma-ho-ga-ny". Later, he offers the Doctor a raspberry leaf as a rare treat.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_c6f7e804	comment	Blake's 7. In "Bounty", Blake encounters Sarkoff, a Fan of the Past who has decorated his home with rare Earth artifacts including a tray of butterflies, now implied to be extinct (Blake later forces Sarkoff to come with him by threatening to smash the tray).
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_d461f757	comment	A deleted scene in Battlestar Galactica (2003) mentions that the meat locker is the most heavily guarded area on a spaceship because the last remaining steaks, burger, fritters, etc, in the universe are there. Later in the series, we see the fleet is reduced to eating algae-derived food, and fruit and cigars are valuable black market commodities.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_d54b59cc	comment	In Demolition Man, society is entirely vegetarian. When they visit the 'scrap' society, he eagerly eats a hamburger. It's not beef... but at least it's not human. It's actually rat. He doesn't care and keeps on eating. He even says it's the best burger he's had in years. note Which is, admittedly, a Lampshade Hanging on the fact it's the only burger he's had in years, having spent the last 30 of them in cryogenic stasis. It bears mentioning that unlike most examples on this page, meat-eating isn't rare due to global disaster, it's a sign of how overly coddled and pacified human civilization has been rendered.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_d6c9c0a4	comment	In the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, the robotic Tachikomas regard all-natural motor oil as a real treat, much better than synthetic oil. Batou treating "his" Tachikoma differently from the rest, by regularly treating it to natural oil, is a catalyst for the robots developing individuality and self-awareness. That and the anomalies caused by the oil corroding part of its circuit board.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_e7e37776	comment	Kaylee eating a strawberry in the Firefly pilot. It was orgasmic. Later Jayne buys a bushel of apples and everybody reacts to this as an amazing treat and question his motives. Simon mentions that the food on a spaceship is considerably worse than planetside, but he is a Core-worlder, and isn't used to how Rim worlds don't have quality food. The apples remind Mal and Zoe of a rather nasty war story; during the Unification War, a favored tactic of Alliance soldiers was to leave fresh fruit lying around — with pressure-triggered grenades hidden inside. Inverted by the goods in the pilot episode; at first, they appear to be gold bars. However, they're eventually revealed to be concentrated protein bars wrapped in gold foil; each capable of feeding a family of four for a month, they're a lot more useful than mere gold. Also a nod to historical piracy and smuggling. During the age of sail, the most common booty cargo was molasses; non-perishable, high-calorie, packed with calcium and potassium... and that's before you turn it into rum. Another easy-to-miss example is the apple-peeling machine on Badger's desk in the pilot. At first glance, it's just a weird instrument, but in the light of this trope and Badger's character, it becomes apparent that it's one of his ways to demonstrate his higher status.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_e9e2b5e9	comment	In Starslip, Sam Edgewise tries to turn down a transfer from captaincy to a desk job, only to be told how prestigious the desk job is: "Edgewise, that desk is the greatest desk in the Academy. It's made of real wood."
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_f3ef0f86	comment	The People in the Artemis Fowl series inhabit an underground civilization and seem to subsist mostly on foods preceded with sim- and things you can grow underground (like fungal goods). Sustainable and organic, but clearly not quite the same as surface food. (Not that they'd set up systems to get food from human farming, because of the pesticides.) The logical extension of this includes things like high-stakes seafood smuggling.
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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_f74b5f80	comment	The environment is fine in Babylon 5, but space travel is still expensive and the eponymous space station is too far from Earth to ship much food out. They've got a positively huge hydroponic farm, but it only grows "essential foods" and is geared towards providing a nutritionally complete diet, rather than a tasty and varied one... though said diet seems to include oranges and nectarines, and Takashima managed to sneak in a few coffee plants under the radar (later taken over by Ivanova). Even for the command staff, a shipment of real eggs is seen as an amazing luxury. Steak is similarly rare, though at one point the doctor fudges some paperwork to have a couple brought in after losing a bet with Garibaldi. An alien meat-based product called "spoo" is available, though it is extremely expensive and, to a human palate, not particularly good. In space, showers are sonic; Captain Sheridan raves about the fact that his quarters have a water-based shower, which was not the case on the warship he commanded previously. The price and difficulty of importing foods is highlighted in one second-season episode when Garibaldi tries to obtain certain Italian ingredients (olive oil, garlic, butter, and anchovies) for a birthday treat.
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_f74b5f80	featureApplicability	1.0
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_f74b5f80	featureConfidence	1.0
Babylon 5	hasFeature	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_f74b5f80
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_faf0ebf1	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_faf0ebf1	comment	Blade Runner 2049: The protagonist acquires a carved wooden horse and is told he's rich because it's genuine wood.
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_faf0ebf1	featureApplicability	1.0
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_faf0ebf1	featureConfidence	1.0
Blade Runner 2049	hasFeature	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_faf0ebf1
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_ffc9bcc1	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_ffc9bcc1	comment	An early example of this is in Soylent Green, where one character is excited about having "hundred and fifty bucks a jar of strawberries."
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_ffc9bcc1	featureApplicability	1.0
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_ffc9bcc1	featureConfidence	1.0
Soylent Green	hasFeature	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap / int_ffc9bcc1

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	processingCategory2	Money Tropes
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	processingCategory2	Speculative Fiction Tropes
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	processingCategory2	Sublime Rhyme
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap	processingCategory2	Tropes in Space
Ghost in the Shell (1995) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Blade Runner / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Mortal Engines / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Soylent Green / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Metro (Franchise) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
86 / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
All Quiet on the Western Front / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Artemis Fowl / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Doona / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
86 EIGHTY-SIX / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Emberverse / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Make Room! Make Room! / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Neuromancer / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Quozl / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Retrieval Artist / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Space Beasts / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
The Caves of Steel / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Earth 2 / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Paranoia (Tabletop Game) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Wraith: The Oblivion (Tabletop Game) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Akane (Video Game) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
>OBSERVER_ (Video Game) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Stand Still, Stay Silent (Webcomic) / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap
Megas XLR / int_e5a814a8	type	Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap

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