39,327
edits
Bizarre Baby Boom: Difference between revisions
m
update links
m (update links) |
m (update links) |
||
Line 4:
It's [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future|the not so distant future]]. Some bizarre event (perhaps a [[Apocalypse How|Global Catastrophe]]) rains down from the heavens to strike an unsuspecting Earth. [[After the End|It passes]], leaving the shattered fragments of humanity that remain to rebuild their lives, thankful that it is all over.
But ''is'' it over?
Some time later, about 10-15 years (or just nine months) after the Event, people start to notice a few ''strange'' things about at least ''some'' of the children now being born into the world. Their hair and eye color doesn't match that of their parents. Odd powers may start to manifest. [[Psychic Powers|Telekinesis, teleportation, setting fires with their minds]], these things come easier to them than riding a bicycle.
Line 29:
* ''[[S-Cry-ed]]'' takes place in a future rocked by a geographical uprising, which has left 1% of the newborn children with the ability to manipulate matter at will and create "Alters", strange creatures that do their bidding. The number rises as the series progresses, evidently a side effect of continued tampering with the power of the other side, which started the whole mess.
* ''[[NEEDLESS]]'' takes place after [[World War Three]] in which those born within the "Black Spot" gain superhuman powers.
* ''[[Please Save My Earth]]'' features the reincarnation of a group of alien scientists after they all die when their civilization ends, and focuses on their lives as typical Japanese teenagers.
* ''[[Gundam]]'''s Universal Century [[Alternate Universe|timeline]] has the Newtypes, humans who developed [[Psychic Powers]] as humanity started to live in space colonies instead of the Earth's surface.
* The Diclonius of ''[[Elfen Lied]]'', which can intentionally infect normal humans so their children will inherit the mutation.
* Although drugs were involved, all the powerful psychics in ''[[Akira]]'' are explicitly young people, or awakened to their powers at young age.
* The "Whispered" of ''[[Full Metal Panic!]]'' possess a psychic connection with an undefined future, which "whispers" the secrets of "[[Applied Phlebotinum|Black Technology]]" directly into their minds. From time to time that connection can be established between individual Whispered. ''Every'' Whispered was born on December 24, 1981 (1984 in the anime) between 11:50 and 11:53 PM Greenwich Mean Time.
* Children from ''[[Toward the Terra]]'', born naturally on Nazca are all Type Blue and {{spoiler|grow incredibly fast.}} They all share the same slightly sociopathic mentality, which connected with their actions doesn't score them many points with the other Mu.
Line 73:
** It was a common trope at the time, that one book was just following the already well-established mutant trend of postwar Atomic Age sci-fi. Stan picked it up by osmosis from a large number of sources, particularly "Children of the Atom", seen above.
** Kuttner also has a story called "Absalom" where more and more smarter and smarter children are born every generation. There is a problem with the older generations being envious and afraid.
* The Salman Rushdie novel ''Midnight's Children'' has 1001 Indian children with low-level superpowers. The connecting thread between them all is that they were all born at midnight on the day India gained its independence.
* In ''[[Xanth]]'', the [[Magic A Is Magic A|magical nature of the land]] is such that anyone born there has a magic talent, but no one from [[Muggles|Mundania]] is lucky enough to have one. So a regular occurrence in the history of Xanth was that a Wave of immigrants will come in from Mundania, have kids, usually having married among themselves, and discover that all of their kids have their own magic talents.
* In [[Octavia Butler]]'s ''Earthseed'' books, a drug designed to cure mental degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's winds up giving the kids [[The Empath|"hyper-empathy syndrome"]] which causes them to hallucinate feeling the pain of others.
* Several of F. Paul Wilson's stories or novels feature folk who were born soon after an influx of 'Otherness' into our world. Some are grotesque [[Body Horror]] mutants, while others are only minimally deformed, but possess an inborn attraction to the Otherness that makes them potential sleeper agents for it.
* Micheal Grant's ''[[Gone (novel)]]'' had a portion of the population (all children, because the book starts the moment that all adults and people over fourteen 'poof') develop psychic powers {{spoiler|thus far because a meteorite hit the nearby nuclear plant 13 years prior, scattering radioactive fallout. Now discovered to have been the arrival of an evil alien, which needed the powers of one of the children to free itself and create a new body.}}
* ''Central Passage'' by Lawrence Schoonover had the American government trying to rebuild after a brief nuclear war, and worried about the potential threat of some oddly mutated children, including the main character's son. A postscript reveals {{spoiler|that the mutants eventually took over. They call non-mutant humans "helots" -- the term the Spartans used for the slaves on whom they periodically declared war as an excuse to murder them.}}
* In ''Ethan of Athos'' (in the [[Vorkosigan Saga]] universe), telepath Terrence Cee {{spoiler|has inserted the telepathy gene into every one of the female genetic samples sent to the exclusively male-populated planet Athos for their reproductive machines, intending to cause one of these. Unusually, protagonist Ethan eventually decides this is a good idea for everyone involved and rolls with it.}}
** Ethan's logic is impeccable and has a moral basis. {{spoiler|with genetic samples having already found their way into the hands of imperialist and generally nasty powers, and Terrence as proof that telepaths are possible, it's only a matter of time before cloned and indoctrinated telepath minorities become government tools. The only way to counter this danger to human freedom is with a race with a free telepath majority.}}
* In ''Shade'', by PC Cast, 16 years before the start of the story there was the Shift, and all children born after the Shift can see ghosts (while the minority who could see ghosts pre-Shift have lost that ability). Ghosts also seem to have changed, becoming purple in color and sometimes going insane and causing sickness in all post-Shift children. {{spoiler|The protagonist was the very first person born before the Shift, and she ends up meeting the very ''last'' person born before the Shift. Both the First and the Last have special powers.}}
Line 92:
* In Arthaus's 3E ''[[Ravenloft]]'' products, calibans are supernaturally-mutated humans, altered in the womb by exposure to magic, curses, or the malignant influence of hags. Metagame-wise, they take the place of half-orcs as potential PCs, orcs being unknown in Ravenloft.
* Inverted in ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]''' sahuagin, evil humanoid fish-people at war with aquatic elves. If sahuagin communities exist too close to elven colonies, a handful of sahuagin children hatch out looking exactly like aquatic elves. These "malenti" are usually killed as weaklings, but those which prove strong enough are raised as spies and used to infiltrate elven enclaves or human coastal settlements ... hence, the inversion, as it's the bad guys exploiting their ''own'' mutants instead of forcing mutant births upon someone else.
* Unexplained Genetic Expression (UGE) was the Technobabble term concocted by scientists of the [[Shadowrun]] Verse, to try to explain why babies all over the world were suddenly being born as elves and dwarves. That lasted until dragons started showing up in the skies again.
| |||