The front cover blurb proclaims:
"An intensely gripping and imaginative novel of tomorrow's children."
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World (London, May 1964), front cover.
(I do not mean that the author of the novel wrote the cover blurb for this edition but how else am I supposed to write the reference?)
A nuclear war generates many human mutations. Some are beneficial and colonize the Solar System before Earth becomes uninhabitable. Millennia later, a Martian member of an archaeological expedition to Earth feels:
"'... the wind gibing at me, there on that old broken planet...'" (EPILOGUE, p. 127)
Andersonian winds always comment somehow.
In James Blish's Black Easter, Armageddon includes World War III. In the sequel, The Day After Judgement, a US military scientific advisor speculates:
control of the environment stopped natural selection for mankind;
furthermore, we even preserve our bad genes;
therefore, mutation is the only remaining evolutionary pressure;
artificial radioactivity and fallout help this process.
(He does not yet know that the demon fortress of Dis has been raised to the Earth's surface in Death Valley where it will be attacked by the Strategic Air Command. The heavenly host has fallen but the war continues.)
6 comments:
Fear of radiation induced mutations was widely believed after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. So early on it wasn't unreasonable for Poul Anderson to use that as a premise for an SF story.
However, study over the following decades showed that
"no statistically demonstrable increase of birth defects/congenital malformations was found among the later conceived children born to survivors of the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Hibakusha
Kaor, Jim!
Exactly, at the times Anderson was writing the different parts of TWILIGHT WORLD such fears did not seem unreasonable.
Ad astra! Sean
Jim: yeah, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't increase the -background constant- of radiation much, and that's what's required to increase the mutation rate.
It wouldn't go up as much as Poul hypothesized, but a global nuclear war with many thousands of nuclear weapons going off -would- increase the rate substantially.
And such a war is now about as credible as it was in the 1980's.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that is what you show readers as happening at the beginning of TO TURN THE TIDE, just as those five American scholars were shanghaied to Antonine Rome.
Ad astra! Sean
Ad astra! Sean
Stirling: "increase the -background constant- of radiation much, and that's what's required to increase the mutation rate."
This gets into the arguments about the 'Linear No Threshold' model of radiation damage vs models which include repair damage to DNA from both radiation and Reactive Oxygen Species.
LNT assumes that damage from a radiation dose is the same no matter whether the dose is received over a few seconds or over a few decades.
In the models which include repair, low dose *rates* produce damage which is mostly repaired on a time scale of hours, while high dose rates overwhelm the repair mechanisms with too much damage in too short a time. So such models predict far lower cancer rates for a high dose accumulated over years than the same dose received over hours. My understanding is that the evidence supports such models, not LNT.
As a proper skeptic I now want to read the best argument & evidence for LNT.
What I have read about the issue is mostly about cancer rates due to radiation. Do you have some reason to think damage to germ line cells would behave radically differently?
Also your statement implies *low* dose rate radiation would be *worse* than *high* dose rate radiation for the same total dose, at least for germ line mutations. None of the models of radiation harm I have seen argue for that.
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