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"…we store information differently, reading a science fiction story, to make it make sense."
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Engineered Plague | ||
| A virus that primarily attacks one sex. |
| The plagues. Were there any women anywhere who weren't infected?
Hovey thought not; they had all caught it, every woman; he didn't want to
think of it. He sighed and rubbed one hand over his eyes. But that had been
the enemy's masterstroke, surely, as good as anything Hovey's own people
had ever delivered. To scatter an infection that fastened only on the female
half of humanity, an infection that drove them, young or old. modest or
wanton, irresistibly toward the male, urged by the inward fire of the disease. . . . Nothing else could so have poisoned human life, could so have
maimed the human race. In women the plague smouldered quietly. It betrayed itself only in their pitted skins, their roughened voices, their cracked lips. But the men who received the virus from them, transmuted by its incubation in their bodies, died quite quickly and, Hovey thought, quite unpleasantly. There was a gangrenous rotting and a smell. No doubt of it, that plague had been the enemy's masterpiece. |
| Technovelgy from The Hole in the Moon,
by Margaret St. Clair. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Compare to designed bacteria from Seeds of the Dusk (1937) by Raymond Z. Gallun and the specific gene weapon from The Mannichon Solution (1967) by Irwin Shaw.
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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
