Through obscure channels, doing research for TSP (like every other writer on the planet, I too have The Secret Project), I came upon Break of Day in the Trenches, the weblog of Esther MacCallum Stewart, who does research on, among other things, the First World War and popular culture. She also teaches SF. In her March 2005 archive page, she has a letter to Women’s Hour (BBC) in response to a program on women in SF which dealt with the subject superficially and by embracing all the stereotypes about both SF and female SF readers.

Which brought to mind my reaction to a recent BBC7 offering, the futuristic thriller Cold Blood. There was nothing original in the plot, but I could live with that. I followed along fine until we came to the “scientific” explosition. The homicidal villain of the piece was a scientist who found a cure for leukemia and pretty much everything else in the biology of the icefish (see left). In the best pulp tradition he self-administered his elixir and began turning into a human-icefish chimera, developing extreme cold tolerance and a tendency to rip out his coworker’s throats. He needed the iron from their blood because his was losing its hemoglobin. Icefish have none: oxygen dissolves better in cold water than warm, so they can survive in very cold water. Now, so I could accept psychosis (though that is probably even worse misrepresented in popular fiction than are genetics and genetic engineering) – say, toxic effects of his elixir. I could accept aplastic anemia or severe red blood dyscrasia or hemoglobin gene expression being turned off by insertion of a bioengineered vector – again toxic effects. But throw in cold adaptation sufficient for long-distance travel across the Antarctic at night PLUS a miracle cure for everything and the suspenders on my belief go pop-sproing! I can’t imagine history being presented, even as escapist entertainment, with such gross absurdities. (Though I am not an historian, and I do not know what torments historians suffer.) Why should SF!!