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Thinking about magical healing machines

sqbr: (up)
Monday, January 5th, 2015 12:07 pm
I'm not sure if I've talked about this before but: every time I encounter Magical Healing/Health machines in speculative fiction (eg the sarcophagi in Stargate, the med bay in Star Trek, the machine that turned Steve into Captain America) I think about how they decide what counts as an illness/injury, and how they decide what Ideal Healthy State to go for. The line between "sick" and "healthy" is to some extent socially mandated and arbitrary, and an optimally "healthy" human population requires variation amongst the individuals. To maximise everything is impossible. You have to make choices.
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Shaping the tide of fannish peer pressure

sqbr: A happy dragon on a pile of books (bookdragon)
Sunday, January 11th, 2009 11:15 am
There's a very interesting post Why we do what we do: riding the wave riffing off another post which I didn't find all that interesting. Anyway, her point (as I see it) is to ask: Why are fans so hesitant to admit they get into fandoms partly due to peer pressure, and given that this peer pressure exists, do we have a responsibility to consider the social consequences? I started writing a comment and it expanded into this post. The context is fanfic writers but I think a lot of this applies to scifi fandom too.
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