For your first quarter at my college, your advisor or whoever made your schedule. I had been assigned US History : colon The Atomic Age. Neat! I thought. I am a chemical engineering major and this kinda fits in with that.
None of what I learned in it was new, per se. Like I already knew about phossy jaw and mmmm yumm radon water and all the silly things we did with ionizing radiation before we uhhhhhhh figured out that was a bad idea. Did you know you used to be able to just. Get an x ray of your feet at the shoe store? People didn't give a shit back then.
Anyways. I'm not sure what it was about that class, but that whole Vibe of "haha He^2+
go brrrr" really stuck with me. Yet I've always been drawn to fantasy, not sci-fi, so I just. Write about nuclear stuff in a fantasy setting. I think it's because it's kind of the closest thing to magic in the real world? Like it's this super powerful thing you can't see but, when it's there, you can feel1 it. There's all this power, locked away in all things, living or not, just waiting to be unleashed by someone powerful--or foolish--enough.
I think HBO Chernobyl did a good job of communicating that "vibe," this Powerful Evil that was in the air and soil and water that you cannot see, but you know will gladly kill you. That's another thing, places like Chernobyl and objects like The Elephant's Foot are "cursed," if you go near them, it's deadly. There's this mythology to them, this extra-level of power you ascribe to it because of all the horror stories you've heard. But, perhaps, you might be able to use your own "magic" to counteract the "curse."
We've all heard "sufficiently advanced science feels like magic," but we almost always think about far-future tech, like Star Trek stuff. Never how scientific concepts we now take for granted would feel like magic to people of the ancient past. My favorite part of science classes in middle school was learning the history of scientific theories. Like all the silly concepts we had for what an atom looked like (the Jimmy Neutron-esque thing with the orbitals is incorrect, and has been for a hot minute). Or that atoms are even a thing.
If, say, a radioactive kaiju showed up and fucked up half the kingdom, how would people interpret the nuclear fallout or its mutagenic properties? How would items imbued with this "cursed" energy be used to do magic? How would people even explain a multi-year nuclear winter lol
My latest short story (the one I am currently not editing by writing this post lol) is sci fi, and there's nuclear reactors used to power Things. The only part of it that's important is the MC going "uh oh if I fuck up and the Thing explodes, then that would cause a big problem, 'cause of all the radiation." And the MC thinks "I'd rather risk my chromosomes unravelling than this other thing." And someone who gave me feedback said they didn't know what that meant, but they liked it. And it made me go. Ah. I guess what happened to Hisashi Ouchi isn't common knowledge2.
But a lot of what happened in specific nuclear accidents aren't, I imagine. Or how nuclear stuff works. Or that "radiation" really means "ionizing radiation," 'cause your 5G and your AM radio and also the LED on your remote control are all "radiation," too, but it's not the "bad" or "scary" kind. I only took, like, 1 and a half quarters of advanced college chemistry (more advanced than regular chem but not as advanced as actual chem majors) so it's not like I know everything, but definitely more than someone who only took 1 thing of chem in high school.
idk this was long and rambling lol. Nuclear stuff is cool. More people should use it in fantasy settings. I also think it's cool that "nuclear stuff" has a very specific type of music. If you've ever played Metroid Prime, you know what I'm talking about. They do the same thing with ROOT√DOUBLE -Before Crime * After Days. You know, the this kind of bloops and beeps
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I'm super-duper white, to the point that, if it's very sunny out, I can feel my skin starting to burn after five or ten minutes. Which I know is not normal but also I know a lot of my perceptions are Not Normal so 🤷
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idk if "unraveled" is the best term to describe what happened. Shattered? Melted? They were absolutely fucked, to the point where they were functionally useless, and everyone knows chromosomes are DNA, and that DNA is all spiraled up like that, so unraveling feels like a good verb? idk i just write whatever feels right neither i nor the MC are scientists so shhhhh