Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

The flavonoids and the plasticoids had taken over. It was his name for TV men. He sometimes thought they came from a species which did not seem to have blood precisely, but some high concentration of haemoglobin-flavonoid in cryogenic plasma. If someone came on their show and cut off their arm or their nose, they would grow another one—plasticoid-flavonoid was a mutation which came from years of talking into microphones and passing on the remark somebody else had just handed you.