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"Science fiction is what scientists would do if they could - if they had enough grant money, enough time, and enough brains to do the wonderful things they would like to do."
- Greg Bear
 |
| 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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| Let's Make Slaver Sunflowers! Engineering Plants To Reflect Light |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
