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Danger! Radiation!

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Using Medicine in Science Fiction

Part of the book series: Science and Fiction ((SCIFICT))

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Abstract

“Radiation” in science fiction can be used to kill, injure, or simply put characters at risk. Many stories and novels written during the first decades after Hiroshima, such as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), depicted the deadly effects of radiation on humans and other life in the apocalyptic scenario of nuclear war. Even earlier, Robert A. Heinlein (using the pseudonym “Anson MacDonald”) in his 1940 story “Solution Unsatisfactory” depicted planes dropping radioactive dust on hostile cities to rapidly wipe out entire populations. Merely mentioning the word “radiation” in a science fiction work puts the reader on alert that dramatic and potentially terrible things could (and probably will) happen.

Dr. Leonard McCoy: “Are you out of your Vulcan mind? No human can tolerate the radiation that’s in there!”

Captain Spock: “As you are so fond of observing, doctor, I am not human.”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

“Well, some mighty queer specimens came out of the radioactive-affected areas around the bomb targets. Funny things happened to the germ plasm. Most of ‘em died out; they couldn’t reproduce; but you’ll still find a few creatures in sanitariums—two heads, you know.”

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing as “Lewis Padgett”

“The Piper’s Son” (1945)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A positron is a form of antimatter identical to an electron except for having a positive charge rather than the negative one of an electron. Isaac Asimov’s classic stories notwithstanding, no one has found a way yet to use positrons to help create advanced robotic brains.

  2. 2.

    Chapter 12 will go into this in much more detail.

  3. 3.

    I provided medical advice to the authors regarding these effects of radiation, and their depiction is indeed realistic.

  4. 4.

    As noted in Chap. 1, isotopes are varieties of an element that have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei.

  5. 5.

    Kinetic energy is the energy associated with movement of a particle or other object.

  6. 6.

    Such neutron stars and black holes are the extremely dense remnants of massive stars that have exploded as Type II supernovae. Individual black holes can combine into a single one having many millions of times the mass of our Sun.

  7. 7.

    A light-year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year, or about 9.461 × 1012 km.

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  1. Springfield, Missouri, USA

    H. G. Stratmann

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  1. H. G. Stratmann
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Stratmann, H. (2016). Danger! Radiation!. In: Using Medicine in Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16015-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16015-3_6

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