Science In My Fiction

Writing combat sequences and traumatic events is always a challenge. There are plenty of questions and answers out there about the mechanics of sword fighting, bare-handed combat, or guns. Most of us can extrapolate our more ordinary experiences with adrenaline to that sort of situation, to get those flavorful extra details: cold sweat, pounding pulse, hands shaking. But it turns out there are even more options than those.

Perceptual distortions are common, in combat situations. The following can be used for dramatic effect or to set up conflicts because of differing accounts of what happened. According to the numbers reported, it’s not unusual to experience more than one of the following distortions — in fact, it would be more unusual to not experience any.

Listed from most common to least common, as reported by Artwohl & Christensen in 1997.

Above 50%:

• Diminished sound: Not to be confused with being deafened by the noise of gunshots or whatever else is going on. This is sound being actively screened out by the brain. It may be a case of sounds being lowered in volume, it might be a complete blockage of all noise, or it might be selective editing of certain noises (such as gunshots.)
• Tunnel vision: The brain can actively screen out visual information, too, so as to narrow one’s focus to the most important (threatening) thing on hand.
• Automatic pilot: This is why soldiers and police officers drill certain sequences of actions into becoming reflexes — because when one’s conscious brain shuts down under the tidal wave of adrenaline, that’s what still works. If your character hasn’t trained his automatic pilot to fight…?
• Heightened visual clarity: This is why some combat pilots can describe, 50 years later, the look on the face of the enemy pilot they shot down. Adrenaline can burn images onto the brain.
• Slow motion time: In addition to being a cool movie effect, this can actually seem to happen. Some swear that they saw the bullets zipping by, and who’s to say they didn’t?
• Memory loss: In addition to the sights and sounds that the brain might edit out, the entire memory can be simply lost. Or is it only misplaced and waiting to burble up in a nightmare…

Below 50%:

• Dissociation: Some get the sensation of watching themselves from a distance, in these situations.
• Intrusive, distracting thoughts: Perhaps it’s thoughts of loved ones, one’s god/goddess, or “did I leave the oven on?”
• Memory distortions: Not lost memories, but incorrect ones. This is part of why eyewitnesses are not as reliable as we wish they were.
• Accelerated time: Blink and you missed it. Or was your brain editing stuff out?
• Intensified sounds: Terror can crank everything up to eleven. This can make the situation even more overwhelming, and maybe accounts for the character losing nerve and running.
• Temporary paralysis: This was relatively rare, but terrifying. How quickly the subject can realize it isn’t real will improve his chances of survival.

The importance of keeping wounds clean is something we take for granted now, and we have all the benefits of science and industrial production to provide us with cheap and effective antiseptics. These posts examine some reasonable options for the doctors and healers of a realistic fantasy world to have at hand.

Part 1 discussed salt and sodium bicarbonate.

Alcohol

Your brave character uncorks that vodka bottle with his teeth and pours it over his wound. Problem solved? Check the label first.

Surgical-grade ethanol runs from 60-90% alcohol by volume. In drinking terms, that’s 120-180 proof. Most of the stuff in the liquor cabinet tops out at 100 proof — though you can get brandies that are 120 proof and the infamous Everclear is available in 151 and 190 proof.

Simple distillation dates from the first century AD, in Europe, and methods gradually improved during the Renaissance and really took off in the 19th century. So the good news is that it’s not unreasonable for a fantasy world to know how to distill alcohol from fermented mash.

The bad news is that simple distillation (from the most primitive forms up to more complex but still low-tech moonshine stills) will not get you pure enough alcohol to be really effective as an antiseptic. For that, you need a reflux column. (For further information, Google reflex column stills and their use by backyard fuel-alcohol producers.)

Whether this is feasible in your fantasy world (the metallurgy skills, the safety issues) is for you to determine. But once you have that worked out and your healers have access to high-proof alcohol, they can be sterilizing wounds and mixing cocktails at the same time, right? Hopefully the producers didn’t opt for fermenting cheaper stuff like sawdust instead of grain (wood alcohol = methanol = blindness) and hopefully they didn’t build their still out of soft, easy-to-work lead…

What about rubbing alcohol? That would be isopropyl alcohol, and it’s a good antiseptic but I haven’t been able to find a way to produce it without industrial chemistry. If you find something, I’d be curious to know.

Terpenes

All of the above — salt, natron, and alcohol — are by no means as effective as modern antibiotics or even the stronger antiseptics like iodine or phenol-based compounds. How you use them in a story is your call, but they are not magic bullets that will realistically bring a character back from death’s door.

If you’re looking for a semi-plausible magic bullet, though: terpenes.

Terpenes are a major component of resin and turpentine (distilled resin) — both important compounds with long, pre-industrial histories. Turpentine itself was used medicinally (and still is, actually) for jobs which included wound-cleansing. (Also de-worming, though I can’t imagine drinking the stuff.) Another natural, low-tech antiseptic containing terpenes is tea tree oil.

Terpenes are compounds synthesized by trees, mostly (some bugs too), particularly conifers (cedar, firs, junipers, etc.). If one wanted a “magic bullet” healing compound in one’s fantasy world, an exotic local tree producing a terpene-packed resin could fit the bill. It can be as scarce and hard to find as the story requires, or common and widely used. Maybe it requires processing — distilling, fermenting, mixing with something else.

So: four ways to help your characters survive their adventures without invoking magic, deities, or doing something as nonsensical as boiling wine. (I wrote a little rant that started all this. It seems to have attracted some eyeballs.)

These posts brought to you by the recurrence of the search term “boiling wine” bringing people to my little rant on the use of same on wounds in GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Magical healing aside, basic sanitation is the one thing that will most increase your characters’ chances of survival when they’re injured. Stitches are helpful. So are herbs. Splints are important for broken bones. But if that cut gets infected, abscesses, and gangrene sets in, all the willow bark tea in the world isn’t going to save you.

In real-world history, the importance of keeping wounds clean was not fully realized until only a few hundred years ago. Why your fantasy world’s physicians know they need to do this is up to you. I’m going to look at how to do it in a world without industrialized chemical analysis and synthesis.

Salt

Gargling saltwater for a sore throat and old recipes for toothpaste made of salt and baking soda (more on that later) work because salt does kill microbes when it’s concentrated enough. This is why pickling and salting work as food preservatives.

Pickled characters

Brine recipes call for anywhere from a half cup to a cup of salt per gallon of water, which would be 3 – 6% salt by volume. Seawater tends to be more like 3 – 4%.

Depending on where your characters are, seawater could be easy to get and a reasonable thing to wash a wound with — if the seawater has been filtered and hopefully boiled as well. It does contain microbes that are acclimated to salty water, after all.

Brine prepared from salt and boiled water is a viable option if your characters have access to economically priced salt. Or maybe it’s a rare and expensive way to treat wounds, reserved only for those who can afford it. Either way, I recommend Mark Kurlansky’s Salt as an excellent overview of salt production over the course of history.

Character jerky

Given a supply of fairly pure salt, why not just pack the wound with salt? Yes, that’s been done in the past. Especially with abscesses, it seems. The packing needs to be changed a few times a day, and after the salt’s done its job the wound will need to be closed by whatever method and given a chance to heal. You don’t actually want to make jerky out of your character.

Sodium bicarbonate

You know it better as baking soda. Combined with salt and a little water, baking soda makes for a nasty-tasting toothpaste but it’ll kill those germs and even bleach your teeth a little.

Naturally occurring bicarbonate is one of several compounds found in natron, which the Egyptians used for cleaning, an antiseptic, and to preserve mummies. Natron is mined from natural deposits, which can be found in a variety of places — not just deserts. Perhaps this would be a viable industry for your fantasy kingdom on top of its medical uses.

Baking soda mouthwash recipes range up to 25% concentration but tend to fall more around a teaspoon per half pint of water which would be… 4%? As with salt above, your healers could use either a brine to wash wounds or pack the wound directly with natron — bearing in mind that we don’t want to mummify the characters just yet. Natron is a drying agent, which means it draws out moisture from the tissues. This makes the tissues less hospitable to bacteria… and life in general.

Stay tuned for the more accurate use of alcohol (not by boiling wine, for crying out loud) and an antiseptic wild card.

PKMzeta is shaping up to be a single, target-able protein in the brain responsible for reconsolidating memories. Discover ran a three part article on it and there was a recent article in Wired, too — the original scientific papers are behind subscription walls, unfortunately.

In brief, reconsolidation is a maintenance process for long-term memories. We think our memories are firm and unchanging, but plenty of studies have proven that they aren’t. They shift a little each time we remember them, each time we reconsolidate them, and over time those shifts add up. (And they’re often inaccurate to begin with, but that’s another issue.)

PKMzeta is a protien that hangs out in the synapses between neurons and maintains a particular ion channel so that the neuron is able to receive signals from the neighbors. Without PKMzeta, the number of those particular ion channels drops and the neuron becomes less sensitive to nearby activity.

Block the PKMzeta when a memory is undergoing reconsolidation and the memory will fade.We already have one drug (propranolol) that does this, and there are sure to be more.

There are tons of questions still to be answered, of course. And there are tons of possible uses and abuses of such a thing. This is such a gold mine of science fiction possibilities that I’m sure I don’t have to list them. But I would like to bring up one.

“This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind-style mindwiping” the article in Wired says. That may be true, but it also does not address an excellent question that movie poses (if you haven’t seen it, I recommend it.) The question being: you can remove the memories associated with a bad relationship with a person, but what about the underlying attraction that drew you to that person in the first place? One of the implications I got from that movie was that the two of them were stuck in a cycle of attraction, falling apart and voluntary mind-wipes.

For “person,” above, substitute anything you like. Kittens. Drugs. Street racing. World domination… like I said, a gold mine of possibilities here.

Part II (Part I is here)

Continuing the question: will it breathe fire?

I threw out the idea of fire-breathing being a mating display, as there isn’t any biological need for a creature to breathe fire. Let’s put aside the question of why and look at how.

Hydrogen

One commenter brought up hydrogen gas, which has the double advantage of being both flammable and lighter than air — it can be used to lighten your dragon for easier flying, whether by storing it on hollow bones or a gasbag (like a bullfrog’s throat pouch, or perhaps by going all the way to designing a zeppelin-like dragon).

However, hydrogen gas isn’t as common in nature as one might hope. Generating it by splitting water is simple — if you have electricity. Electricity-generating organs do exist in nature, of course, but most of them generate only mild fields. A small, specialized organ generating enough current to split water into component gasses could work, given a ready supply of water and enough metabolic energy to generate enough gas.

Hydrogen can be produced by some forms of algae (there has been some research on that in the bio-fuels field) but those require sunlight and the inside of a dragon is notoriously dark (or can you fix that?) Some sort of symbiotic microbe in the dragon’s gut, generating hydrogen from yesterday’s lunch, may be your best bet — your dragon gets his gas with minimal effort.

One more side note: no need for your dragon to eat rocks. Hydrogen is everywhere. It’s just a matter of separating it out.

Methane

Far less sexy than hydrogen, admittedly, but methane has the advantage of being easy to generate using existing microbes. It’s generated in the gut by bacteria which require neither light nor air, and could be accumulated in a specialized organ for siphoning back toward the head for ignition.

Or, you could be really brave and let the methane continue on its way to be expelled in the usual manner with a less-than-usual ignition organ under the tail… so that both ends of your dragon are equally dangerous… hey, it could still be a heck of a mating display.

And a non-flammable option

Acid

Hydrochloric acid, as produced in the stomachs of meat-eating animals, is quite able to burn exposed skin and eat through fabrics. More potent acids like sulfuric or nitric acid aren’t produced biologically but if one can invent a tough enough organ to store the stuff, I think it could be made quite plausible.

Unlike fire being a mating display, acid spraying makes more sense as a defensive mechanism along the lines of secreting surface poisons or explosive defecation. An acid-spraying dragon may well be short on the fangs and claws and other armaments, eat things that don’t need intensive hunting and killing, and be subject to predation by bigger, scarier monsters.

Which could be just as interesting as your standard-issue dragon, of course.

Part I (Part II is here)

Everybody loves dragons. And while wingless ones built along the lines of Komodo dragons or alligators can be a viable part of your fantasy ecosystem, let’s admit it. We want them up in the air and breathing fire or electricity or something fun.

A quick survey of existing flying creatures: the flying fox can get as large as 2.5 to 3 pounds and a wingspan of nearly four feet. The harpy eagle‘s wingspan can be 6 to 6.5 feet and they top out at 20 pounds or so.

Mind you, I would not want to meet a 20-pound dragon with a 6.5-foot wingspan, or be on the wrong side of its talons. And a hero would look really bad-ass when his pet swooped down to land on his (steel-reinforced) falconing glove.

In green, the Quetzalcoatlus northropi, with a human for comparison. Modified from a diagram featured in Witton and Naish (2008).

Let’s aim higher.

Quetzalcoatlus is the largest flying dinosaur discovered so far. Estimates vary, but it seems safe to assume a wingspan of 30 to 35 feet (9-10.5 m). Weight estimates have varied from as light as 150 to over a thousand pounds (68-453+ kg) (in a 2010 estimate generated mathematically). The first question is, of course, can this creature get into the air? Ostriches are the only current birds of similar weight — and they top out at 300 pounds.

Will it fly?

The issue was addressed by Witton and Habib in a 2010 paper on giant pterosaur flight dynamics. Their analysis of existing fossils and reconstructions of musculature led to some interesting possibilities. For their analysis, they settled on a Quetzalcoatlus of 32-36 foot (10-11 m) wingspan and 400-550 pound (180-250 kg) weight. Witton and Habib assert that these giant pterosaurs had sufficient bone strength and muscle for flying — with some mild caveats.

• Assisted launching. The pterosaurs may have launched themselves with a strong jump followed by vigorous flapping. You can find a wide variety of birds using this strategy, especially larger ones like eagles. Others have suggested that pterosaurs may have used the running-start approach to launch or jumped off cliffs to get that initial burst of speed. Witton and Habib lean toward the jumping method, though.

• Soaring. Rather than flapping constantly, pterosaurs may have done most of their flying by finding thermals and winds to soar on. Albatrosses and vultures do this a lot — it saves a great deal of energy, and when you’re big you need to save energy.

• Moving on land. Pterosaurs were not built for it. But the authors theorize that they may have been able to get about by hopping/jumping (saltation, as sparrows do) and possibly bipedal walking (many birds do this — ducks, robins, hawks…).

What does it eat?

Witton and Naish wrote a 2008 paper on morphology, in which they addressed some of the questions of the morphology and ecology of giant pterosaurs, including Quetzalcoatlus. It’s good reference material, but chances are you aren’t building a dragon with a stork-like beak and a neck that’s long like a stork but less flexible — like a lizard. They lay out some reasonable options for such creatures, but a traditional dragon with a shorter muzzle, teeth, and greater neck flexibility will have more predatory options.

Bearing in mind the three rules of predators as formulated by me (and only me): 1. Don’t get hurt. 2. Don’t work too hard. 3. If it gets you food, do it. Also bear in mind that while an earth-bound predator can gorge on a kill and then slink away to digest, a flying predator can’t eat so much at once that he can’t fly away if threatened. Many small meals throughout the day are probably the best strategy.

• Fishing. This is a perfectly good way to acquire a relatively large amount of calories with a reasonable amount of work. Given the general structure of a Quetzalcoatlus-based dragon, I would think that divebomb-style fishing (as done by ospreys and eagles) could work.

• Carrion. It’s not glamorous, but it fulfills rules 2 and 3.

• Traditional airborne hunting. This could be hunting birds, other dragons, or earth-bound prey, as falcons and hawks do. But bear in mind the stipulation about over-eating and the fact that it’s easier for a rabbit to hide in a forest than for a fish to hide in a lake. Hunting animals that congregate in large groups in meadows (or other open terrain) will make hunting easier… but also remember that we’re talking about a 30-foot wingspan dragon blotting out the sun. It’s difficult to miss that flying overhead, one would think. Or can you find a work-around for that?

Will it breathe fire?

Scientifically, the problem with breathing fire has always been the question why does it need to? Anne McCaffrey came up with one of the best answers (we bred them to do it) but in strict ecological terms, teeth and talons are quite sufficient for all your hunting needs. And if a feature isn’t useful to a creature’s survival, it isn’t done. Right?

Well, except for things that the opposite sex finds attractive. Such as peacock tails, silly dances, and the ability to compose sonnets.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: imagine fire-breathing (or lightning bolts, what-have-you) as a mating display. We will get back to this in Part 2.