io9
If there's anything worse than meeting a dangerous alien in space, it's having sex with an alien and getting a dangerous disease. As Mercury de Sade once said, the main point of meeting aliens is to find their holes so you can fuck them. That may be true, but galactic VD isn't the only disease danger out there in the world beyond our world. There are all kinds of nasty scifi bugs you can pick up in space, the future, and other dimensions. And they don't just come from sex. Want to prep your inoculation kit? Check out our guide to exo-pathology.
Diseases from space
Of course the classic space disease hits earth in The Andromeda Strain, an early-1970s novel written by a then-unknown medical doctor called Michael Crichton. He was so obsessed with making his deadly disease from a meteor into the stuff of hard science fiction that he actually included footnotes to medical journals and other sources to prove that this scenario could happen. A miniseries based on the book is about to hit the airwaves soon, and it's pretty fun and gross so keep your eyes peeled for it. One of the coolest diseases from space was created by award-winning author Octavia Butler in the novel Clay's Ark, about a guy named Clay who returns from space infected with a strange virus. As the virus spreads, a percentage of the population begins to return to a semi-animalistic state, growing a four-legged morphology and being led by instinct to form patriarchal packs of human-hunting creatures. It's a really fascinating look at what would happen if people could not fight their "animalistic" urges to kill and fuck, and had to give into those urges even as they knew they weren't in their best interests. On a lighter note, there is the excellent space disease that comes in a meterorite in one of the short stories in 1980s classic movie Creepshow. Stephen King in a rare movie acting role plays a dim-witted guy in Maine who touches the meterorite and slowly turns into a giant plant creature. Cannot be missed. And then there's the disease that hits the space station in the movie version of Doom, which turns people into creatures who can shoot their tongues. You really don't need to know much more than that, honestly.
Sexually-transmitted diseases
One of the most bizarre episodes on Star Trek: Enterprise was "Stigma," the "psychic AIDS" episode where vulcan hottie T'Pol revealed that she'd been mind-raped by some seriously unsafe dude and it had given her a kind of brain-HIV that was explained with the usual "tech tech tech" panache you know so well from Trek. Not surprisingly, another great scifi sex disease comes from David Cronenberg, whose movie Rabid tells a rather incoherent story about how plastic surgery leads to this sex disease that involves things that live in armpits and poke you. No, really. Although The Hunger is a vampire movie (where Susan Sarandon has sex with Catherine Deneuve, to the collective happiness of people the world over), the flick treats vampirism scientifically — it turns out that this condition (which is transmitted during sex, though maybe it doesn't have to be, but who cares because of the aforementioned hot lesbian sex) involves sciencey things like blood cells and ancient Egyptians. But one of the truly coolest and most disturbing sex diseases is "the bug" in the comic book series Black Hole, by Charles Burns. In the book, hundreds of teenagers who've caught the bug have become mutant stoners living in the woods to escape stigma (ooh, there's that word again) from the non-mutant populace. Excitingly, Black Hole is about to become a movie directed by David "Fight Club" Fincher, with some writing credits going to Neil Gaiman. And if you like MILFs, you've got to see Flesh-Eating Mothers, all about suburban moms who get a bizarre venereal disease that turns them into child-eating freaks.
Diseases of the Superpowered:
You've probably forgotten Anne McCaffrey's novel Crystal Singer, but we haven't. People with perfect pitch go to a planet where crystals for ship engines are mined using special tones that can only be produced by singing (in perfect pitch). Singers who land on the planet hoping to become miners are all stricken with a disease that kills some, but leaves the rest with super-senses and groovy sex lives. Similarly, a disease grants mega-powers in the Powers comic book, and in the novel The Changeling Plague. Then there are the diseases that only affect super-powered people, like the legacy virus in X-Men, which kills only mutants. Then there's the cylon disease in Battlestar Galactica, which spreads via the resurrection process and kills the cylons in a grisly way — it's a nice cross between computer virus and bio-virus. And on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there was a disease that affected only the mega-powered changelings, making them more and more gooey each time they changed shape until they turned into nothing but yucky liquid.
Diseases that make you a zombie
The most popular scifi disease these days has to be anything that turns people into zombies. There's the disease "Rage" in 28 Days Later, which converts people into fast-moving, drooling, human-eating freaks. And it would seem that pretty much the same disease is attacking people in the remake of I Am Legend that came out a few months ago, though that disease kills a lot of people and leaves only a small percentage of the population as zombies. A government-created disease is what causes Jenna Jameson to become the world's first zombie stripper in Zombie Strippers, and the amazing novel World War Z (soon to be a movie) is a pseudo-documentary tale of what happens to the world when a zombie virus divides the population into killers and killed.
Diseases that reduce the population
If you're sick of VD from space, and zombies seem somehow unrealistic to you, there are always the more realistic scifi diseases that just reduce the population by killing people instead of turning them into mutants or monsters. In Stephen King's classic The Stand, the world has been reduced by a government-created virus. Survivors have to pick sides between a nice old lady who is fighting a mean young man as they try to recreate human civilization (I think there's something about god and the devil in there too, but let's please ignore that). Ursula Le Guin's novel Lathe of Heaven is about what happens when a liberal doctor discovers that his patient can change reality with his dreams. In an effort to create world peace and reduce overpopulation, the doctor tries to direct his patient's dreams, only to find that they come true in a way he didn't expect. Populations are reduced via a virulent plague, and peace breaks out when aliens attack the moon and the tiny group of remaining humans come together against a common enemy. In Connie Willis' awesome time-travel tale The Doomsday Book, a pandemic is reducing the population of London while a young woman travels back to the Middle Ages and lives through a wave of the black death that is ravaging the tiny town she's taken shelter in. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic biotech novel, is about a mad scientist who destroys humanity with a plague in his attempt to create a more perfect species that will be free of war and other human problems.
Comments
Good ol Mags Atwood. Nice to see some CanCon here.
Of course, the Andromeda Strain was filmed in Vancouver.
Don't make out with facehuggers.
I have often thought that mankind's first contact with aliens would be disastrous due to the diseases involved. Much like the Europeans unknowingly brought disease over that wiped out the Native Americans and Mayans.
Space pox would suck indeed, probably not as bad as the space clap though. Or Martian Gonorrhea.
Its VD from outer space!
You forgot space herpes from The Ice Pirates.
@hopskipper: THAT'S exactly what I was going to say hahah
Oh! I'm so glad you put up Stephen King's "The Stand" that has to be one of those books that I'd take with me on a desert island.
But I was wondering weren't the creatures in "I Am Legend" vampires not zombies? O_O
Gonna disagree with you on The Hunger. The only scientific part of it is that Sarandon's character studies aging.
It's a straight vampire film.
How about the "polywater" from the Star Trek episode "The Naked Time" and its ST:TNG sequel, "The Naked Now"? The intoxicating effects are transmitted through physical contact, and they inspire Lt. Tasha Yar to take Lt. Cmdr. Data to bed.
It's not a space disease, but watch out of Electro-Gonorrhea, the noisy killer.
Wait, no mention of the coolest space virus ever, the Wild Card virus from the Wild Cards anthologies (edited by George R. R. Martin, I believe)? The Wild Card virus was a specially developed superbug created by aliens in a far off galaxy whose DNA closely matched ours and dropped on our planet just to make sure it worked. 95% of the people affected die horribly, 4% turn into wierd mutants, and 1% gets awesome superpowers. Which is cool. Plus the short stories tended to be really original, very well written, and extremely original. Did I mention the virus bomb drops in 1946? Wild Cards rules, was recently released, and just a couple months ago a NEW book came out. Check it.
@Silver_Back: Agree with the Stand, but its gotta be unabridged. And yeah, in the I am Legend book they were obviously vampires (he hung up garlic to keep them away).
@ hapeximendios
Preach it!
I LOVED Black Hole.
...but in no way did it take place in space.
In fact, I'm not even sure it could be termed as Sci-fi, since it was blatantly about AIDS.
I can only imagine what James T. Kirk had to deal with.
"Bo-nes! I. Need you. I've. Got. Green blisters allovermypenis!"
"Damnit Jim, this is the third time you've had Star Herpes!"
There was a Cory Doctorow story about a genetic scientist who created a virus that would be sexually transmitted and could tell if you had sex with partners other than your first - trying to force the world into a Christian monogamous world - but it had the side effect of not being able to differentiate between children being born and women having extra marital sex - really good read on the Sci-Fi virus front.
You forgot Harry Kim, he got "The shared heart" in the episode of voyager "The Disease". You could also argue the retrovirus from the Taresians in "Favorite Son" would kill him if he had sex, even though he didn't get it originally from sex. That was the one that morphed him into another species. Harry Kim had it rough. He got all the diseases. He was always the one who got sick or hurt. He also isn't even the same Harry that started the mission with the others.
@hopskipper: Agreeance. This list is incomplete without space herpes.
@Silver_Back: The Stand is one of my favorites also. The Walking Man is definitely a stand in for the devil however as he appears not only in this novel.
In space no one can hear you scream when you pee.
Psst! Quoth the great space captain, Zap Brannigan: "I find the most erotic part of a woman is the boobies."
Every good space captain knows to wrap-slash-otherwise-barrier it up when getting it on in space!
@Grey_Area: That inspired me.
[www.maj.com]
Not that I blame you for forgetting, but the cause of the vamp--oops, I mean, phages in Ultraviolet is a virus.
Also, don't forget The Legacy Virus from X-Men, aka "Mutant AIDS," as if mutancy itself weren't bad enough to be treated as a genetic disease. Also, Cable suffers from the Techno-Organic Virus, hence his cyborg arm.
And isn't 12 Monkeys all about finding the source of a plague that drove humanity underground? Or was that all contrivance to justify showing us Bruce Willis' bare ass?
@suprspi: You almost got it right. The story is The Moral Virologist, and it was an early short story by Greg Egan, a much better author.
The ending is a bit different too. The whole story is online, everyone should read it!
@LicenseFarm: Actually I mentioned the Legacy Virus in my post.
And yes to Bruce Willis' ass.
I always thought of The Blob as a giant space leukocyte.
A force of purity and light. An agent of cosmic cleansing.
This is because my general experience with fellow humans has me recoiling from them as if they were sodden syphilitic monsters, richly deserving extermination from off a lovely, fecund planet.
Yes, I am in customer service. Would you like cream with that?
This [www.imdb.com] underrated steampunk/vampire movie trats vampirism as a disease created by alkymist who discovered genetic manipulation, creating the a.o. the black death and a disease whitch caused some children to be born as vampires. The acting is good for a mid/lowbudget movie and the story is nice and twisty =)
@Annalee Newitz: What about the sexually transmitted virus in Bendis' Powers book?
Or the fact that if you suck off a super-hero in his universe you can fly for 15 minutes.
Shit you not.
How could you forget Hotdog's "itchy crotch" STD on BSG? That's one of those moments that cracks me up.. "I hope she was worth it"
I haven't seen it elsewhere in the comments, but isn't that creepshop segment just a pisstake on Lovecraft's The Color of Space?
Also, if we're going to throw in The Hunger, how about Ginger Snaps where lycanthropy is a disease transmitted by body fluids (including sex).
Or what about all the memitic diseases in Warren Ellis' comics like JLA's "New Maps of Hell?"
Serenity, anyone.
Government trys to perfect humans and instead kills off 80% of them and turns the rest in psyho, flesh eating monsters that even Jayne is afraid of.
@Smeagol92055: @Grey_Area: win, both of you!
As we know in Cobra, Stallone said...
"You're the disease and I'm the cure"
Well, try applying that to some galactical transmitted disease.
"Your're the disease and I'm fucked"
What about "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert? Not from space but then not all of the diseases mentioned in the article are either. Guy's wife and kids are killed by a IRA car bomb. Goes a bit crazy and decides that certain countries need to feel his pain. Designs a virus that kills only women and then infects the countries he thinks deserve it.
Um, the symbiote in "Crystal Singer" etc. didn't have any effect on its hosts' sex lives. Age span, healing, other factors, yes, but not that.
@Annalee Newitz: Wouldn't you know, I did a term search for "monkeys" and "ultraviolet" to doublecheck that I didn't neglect anything, but then I thought of the Legacy Virus as I was typing. That'll learn me.
There's always David Brin's "Giving Plague", a blood-borne disease that makes those infected more altruistic, and thus more likely to donate blood...
The comic book Transmetropolitan had some hilarious alien venereal diseases, my favorite being the Martian VD that gives you giant green sacs of singing (!) maggots all over your genitals, ass and face.
I like to imagine the maggots all singing showtunes 24/7.
@JohnnyZito: "Or the fact that if you suck off a super-hero..."
We'll take your word for it.
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There was also the giant single celled space organism that was about to infect our galaxy in ST TOS.
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