Origin of the Word Meat World

Meat World is a term more commonly used lately referring to the 'real world' AKA the place where we all actually live in.

I have been hearing this phrased used more often now through places like MySpace, Facebook, and so forth when explaining about the person in the real world AKA Meat World. I then thought to myself, isn't that a cyberpunk type of phrase and then went out looking to figure out where it came from originally. I thought maybe some of the masters of the cyberpunk genre like William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick, or many others of the genre. Most I could find were several references to meat AKA our human bodies not online but in the real world. Then it came to me, I had read it in one of my Shadowrun 1st Edition books a long time ago.

Since the game came out in 1989 and they used Meat World for the deckers explaining their bodies. But the whole idea that one of my gaming books in probably one of my favorite systems to play came up with the term we use every day. This I find amusing if not scary since the cyberpunk world is cool to read about I am not totally sure I want to live it yet.

I swear, I will look around one day and we will all be using the Matrix instead of the internet and living in Arcologies run by mega-corporations.