medical

10
Nov
2017

Spotlight on Bicoulamine

Spotlight on Bicoulamine

Bicoulamine, a wholly original drug, needs to be explored more.
Bicoulamine

Background

As a part of the plot of Multiverse II, the collapsed American government needed addicted soldiers to fight. And Coulamine proved to be a great invention, the ‘candy’ pacifying the masses. As I had written them, humans of the post-World War III time period would do just about anything to get their hands on the ‘candy’. They would go without sex, shelter, food, or water, all in the name of just another fix. Furthermore, they would fight as soldiers. However, they still had a small measure of free will, aptly demonstrated by Rita Spinelli. Rita’s breaking of her addiction meant others could do so as well, if they only had enough will, and someone to help them through it. This was one of the reasons why she tried so hard to help Seymour Sonia break his own addiction to the stuff.

However, because I had already created and used my Tricoulamine (a fatal nerve gas) in the Intolerance story, that begged the question: what had existed in between the two chemical compounds, and covered the time period from around 2053 to 2158? Hence I came up with a truly twisted drug which would not pacify the masses. Instead, it turned them into homicidal psychopaths. That had the capacity to make for some really wild writing. However, because the story was never completed, Bicoulamine never really lived up to its fullest potential.

Upshot

While the drug turned out to be a really good idea, I did not get a chance to truly explore it. Hence I feel there is a lot more to tell about Bicoulamine and the post-World War III American landscape.

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Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Spotlight, Times of the HG Wells series, 0 comments
14
Oct
2016

Inspiration – Injuries

Inspiration – Injuries

Injuries, believe it or not, can inspire.

Background

Inspiration – Injuries

Inspiration – Injuries

What a weird thing for inspiration, eh?

But it’s still something that has happened to me. It can still, in a backhanded way, be inspiring.

The Specifics of Creation

For character injuries, Star Trek always used to go beyond believability and hit a weird Twilight Zone, where everything was magically, mystically cured, with the patient suffering no or nearly no pain.

That’s not how the real world works, and I am so glad Enterprise made it a point of showing cures being neither instantaneous nor perfect.

It’s a weird image, but this is Malcolm Reed in rehab during the Dead Stop Enterprise episode.

Well, sometimes. At least , when Malcolm was injured in Minefield, he was still injured in Dead Stop and, in fact, Phlox had the automated repair station cure Malcolm’s broken leg.

Ouch!

For my own work, I have used it as a jumping off point. It is so easy in fiction to make people into super people, and make it so injuries don’t really affect them. This is deus ex machina-style unreality at its worst. Sprains hurt. Breaks make you limp or make your arm hang useless.  An allergy (not exactly an injury but certainly a medical condition) can make you stop breathing.

Perhaps the worst injury I’ve gotten is a set of three (hey, if you’re going to do something, go all the way, eh?) meniscus tears in my right knee. While this has not yet informed my fanfiction writing, it has affected my wholly original work. Hence in The Enigman Cave, there is a character with that exact same injury.

Injuries in My Work

In  fanfiction, I took the fight from Harbinger and reworked it twice, both times involving Malcolm. Once was with Doug, in Together. The other was in The Three of Us, with Jay  This is as a reprise of the fight, and Lili even laments that it might be a ‘second harbinger’. Also, in both of my versions of the fight, I inflict similar injuries on the men, as an homage to the canon scene. There are eye and kidney injuries, just as in the original. However, the addition of Lili to the dynamic means there is a witness and the aftermath is far more problematic. In Together, Lili is pregnant with Marie Patrice and keels over, overcome by intense kicking. Pamela ends up taking her to the Medical Center nearby in San Francisco, and the upshot is an uneasy truce between the men.

In The Three of Us, Archer finds the two men fighting. He orders the men to sickbay where Phlox begins to treat them, but they both continue posturing and refuse treatment. Archer calls Lili in and she is alarmed at their conditions. Going beyond the original, in this version of the fight, Jay suffers from a lung injury which results in him coughing, a reference directly back to Penicillin.  It’s a fitting internal bit of consistency which also foreshadows that short story’s significance in Everybody Knows this is Nowhere.

Upshot

Battered and bruised characters should not heal immediately and automatically, I feel. Even with advanced medical technology, it just seems as if that would be too much of a cop-out and would severely impair storytelling.

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Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Inspiration-Mechanics, 0 comments
20
Oct
2015

Review – Worry

Review – Worry

Worry is, well, worrisome, I suppose.

For a prompt with the same name as the title, I wanted to do a little drabble about T’Pol and her sometimes uneven relationship with a certain crew member.

Background

Review – Worry

Worried T’Pol

In canon, T’Pol’s relationship with Porthos is a bit rocky. In the beginning, she is bothered by his smell and cannot adjust to the idea of a pet being an appropriate presence on a starship. Because Jonathan Archer is so wrapped up in the dog’s well being, and T’Pol and Jonathan do not get off on the best footing in the beginning of the series, there might be some carry over. That is, maybe T’Pol has issues with Porthos because she has issues with Archer. Fortunately, she warms up to both of them.

A part of T’Pol’s journey as a character is to understand and accept both of them. Love or hate These are the Voyages (hate it!), the scene where he stiffly hugs her has some merit.

So now she has cause to have concern over Porthos. And I feel this would ring true as well.

Plot

It’s just a little thing, but Porthos is sick. T’Pol has already rushed him to Sick Bay. The little drabble just covers her fretting and asking Phlox about his condition.

Story Postings

Rating

The story has a K rating.

Upshot

Porthos has a value to the crew that T’Pol only begins to understand later in the series. To my mind, it made sense for that understanding to happen during the E2 alternate timeline as well. For her, he has become more than just the captain’s pet. And he’s more than the odd addition to the crew she initially didn’t much care for. Now, she cares for him a great deal. I was glad to be able to showcase that.

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Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Interphases series, Review, 0 comments
08
Nov
2013

Spotlight – Stem Cell Growth Accelerator

Spotlight – Stem Cell Growth Accelerator

Stem Cell Growth Accelerator is one useful invention.

Background

As I wrote the HG Wells Star Trek fan fiction stories, I kept butting up against one unfortunate problem – how do you handle medical care?

After all, throughout the ages, medical care has, mainly, been abhorrent. Was I to show people undergoing bloodletting or getting leeches for treatments? Or show them dunked in wells in order to drive out the evil spirits? Hell, Leonard McCoy denounced surgery as ‘butchery’ in TOS. What’s a time traveler to do?

Enter stem cell growth accelerator.

The Thought Experiment

Spotlight – Stem Cell Growth Accelerator

My initial inspiration came from, of all things, how I understand HIV to spread through the body. My understanding is that the retrovirus enters into a cell that becomes a host and essentially converts that cell into an HIV factory. The body does not recognize this as a problem for a long time, as the HIV is sitting within what, to the body, seems to be a normal, healthy cell.

And so I thought – what if, instead of making a horrible virus, a host cell was, instead, making some sort of cure cells. And what if it could make them at a phenomenal rate?

If a chemical like that could be introduced into a person, and it could self-replicate, and it would be healing rather than harming, the possibilities were very nearly endless.

In order to prevent things from becoming too good to be true, I further decided that, while the healing process would be fast, all pain would remain. Hence, a year’s worth of pain could be easily crammed into an hour.

Ow.

Upshot

Stem cell growth accelerator is one of the easiest inventions for me to explain. Exposition is generally a snap. I often have a character break an arm or suffer a cut or a gunshot and, voila! They are suddenly healed. But they cringe and nearly pass out while the healing process is occurring. I will definitely use this idea more. I may even at some point write something showing its development.

Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Spotlight, Times of the HG Wells series, 5 comments