The times, the place

[polaris93]

I saw my psychotherapist again today. I told her about the time when I was 2-1/2 that my adoptive mother came this close to killing -- or, at best, leaving us all so badly injured that death would have been welcome -- herself, her sister, Betty, me, and her sister's 1-1/2 year-old adoptive daughter, Jan, by trying to play chicken with a speeding

Comments

[polaris93]

If you're talking about the story from The Dragon and the Crown, the thing about the insects was nothing other than what normally happens after a battle or a tremendous disaster, when there are corpses of numerous creatures, human and otherwise, together with the wounded bodies of still-living ones, in quantity over a large area. The wounds nnaturally attract many insects, while the bodies, which begin to putrify, likewise draw insects as well as rats and other carrion-eaters, nature's garbage-men. If there are buzzards, crows, and/or ravens in the area, they'd come, too. When you have as many wounded, dying, and dead humans and other creatures all in one place as the scene described in that post, many millions of them including dogs, cats, pet birds, ferrets, even horses and some cattle as well as human beings, along with some wild creatures in the area for whatever reason, that's one hell of a lot of carrion, and within a day or two it all begins to stink, big-time. As far as carrion-eaters are concerned, that smell is like a huge neon sign you can see for tens of miles that says

BEST EATS IN TOWN HERE!!!

in bright red, blue, green, and white letters blinking on-off-on-off . . .

My driving interests and fields of study include astrobiology, xenobiology, paleobiology, and related fields of study, and this is the sort of thing any biologist can tell you will draw ants, flies, cockroaches, rats, ravens, crows, buzzards, and anything else that likes "well-seasoned" meat, of which there would be countless millions (of the insects, anyway) in the neighborhoods of cities on which hydrogen bombs had been used. As the story shows, of course, those would begin to die as a result of radiation sickness after a few days, as well. The blasted city and its immediate environs would become a sort of predator trap, drawing in hungry scavengers and predators and then killing them dead within a short while. Any biologist at a university in your area could confirm this if you described this scene to them. There are a number of technical books on the results of nuclear war that do, too, but the best sources are historical accounts of great battles prior to, say, 500 AD which go into the aftermath of those battles, which always drew great quantities of flies and other scavengers to feast on the wounds of the living and the bodies of the dead. Flies need carrion for nurseries for their eggs, and so do many other insects, so you can see why such a scene of carnage would be so attractive to them.