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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| 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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| Biological War: A Scenario |
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| Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species |
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
