Five Stories Driven by a Disregard for Basic Safety

[james_davis_nicoll]

Five Stories Driven by a Disregard for Basic Safety

Comments

[ba_munronoe]

Didn't the actions of a terrorist play a major role in the Prometheus Crisis? Of course, keeping from hiring terrorists as members of your nuclear power plant staff is also a safety issue, but perhaps one less prominent in people's minds in 1987 than today.

[dragoness_e]

The actions of a terrorist also played a part in the zombie apocalypse in the Newsflesh series, which someone brought up in the comments as an example of cutting corners in medical safety, which it wasn't. Unless it was expected that fanatic terrorists should pay attention to medical safety when committing bioterrorism.

[bunsen_h]

The experimental cold cure wasn't released by terrorists; it was released by activists on the principle of "this should be free for everyone!"

It seems to me that the zombie apocalypse was probably inevitable in that fictional world, whenever the two medical viral systems reached the point in their respective testing/release processes that they became common enough for one person to happen to have been treated with both. The interaction would be unlikely to have been predictable, or detectable except by occurring.

But I think that a story could be written based on the premise that it is extremely unlikely that two medical viruses could, by coincidence, merge to produce a viable combination that so closely mimics the behaviour of "classic zombies". Clearly, then, it is not coincidence; they must have been engineered for that.

[ba_munronoe]

Given the scale and power of the Conspiracy revealed over the series, it's hardly implausible that they were behind the plague in the first place. It makes more sense of their success, after all: their plots weren't an improvisation, but had elements in place well before the actual apocalypse broke out.

[(Anonymous)]

Hogwart's is possibly the least safety-minded school fiction. Where else would the punishment for a minor infraction be a night-time hike through the incredibly perilous *Forbidden*Forest* chasing down a large wounded creature? Where they keep powerful artifacts that are sought after by evil overlords who would have no qualms about hacking through any number of students to get it? The Mirror of Erised is a gateway to a lifetime of addiction. And you can't tell me that those damned moving staircases aren't a falling hazard!

And that's just the first year!

-AwesomeAud

[(Anonymous)]

Harry Potter's biography only mentions staircases "that led somewhere different on a Friday", I think the film makers got over-inspired. ;-)

Asked in 2000 about the school floor plan, J K Rowling said "it would be difficult for the most skilled architect to draw, owing to the fact that the staircases and the rooms keep moving. However, I have a very vivid mental image of what it looks like."