Deep Impact

Forget the jet-packs and flying cars. What we want is that medical nanotechnology they have in SF, the stuff that magically, painlessly restores our damaged bits a molecule at a time. Instead ...

Wheeeeeeeeee

It happened when the madness of launching the SF Encyclopedia was at its height. Brian Aldiss's quickie definition of SF is "Hubris clobbered by nemesis." Which means that in my hour of glory I broke a tooth. And the nice man with the white coat and the very high-pitched drill says it needs to be crowned.

Wheeeeeeeeee

Think of something else. Great SF About Dentists. There's a proud genre tradition that Earth's dentists are so superior that they get abducted by aliens desperate for their skills. Like the unfortunate Goldpepper in Avram Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr Morris Goldpepper", held captive by toothless humanoids within whose dentures he cunningly conceals his messages for help. The dentist hero of Piers Anthony's Prostho Plus is also kidnapped and forced to cruise the galaxy fixing weird sets of teeth, including one cavity so gigantic that he nearly gets lost inside. The one in my jaw feels about that size now.

Wheeeeeeeeee

Happier thought. The Phillips radiation treatment in Doc Smith's Lensman books. One dose and your missing parts start to regrow, whereupon elderly test subjects rediscover the prolonged agonies of cutting new teeth while their comrades laugh heartily. Maybe not such a good wish-fulfilment after all.

Wheeeeeeeeee

Who else in SF has dental peculiarities? Ah: the doomed Duke Leto in Dune gets a replacement tooth (inserted without anaesthetic, argh argh) which, once bitten, releases enough poison gas to kill everyone in the room. Roars of laughter, breaks the ice at parties. Cute, but as a fashion accessory it'll never catch on. Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination is rewired as a cyborg superman, with his teeth as the operating switchboard for amazing new powers. Must have been so embarrassing when he bit into a gristly steak, flipped a tooth and caused his eyes to light up, or accelerated by accident into a superspeed killing frenzy.

Wheeeeeeeeee

SF conventions are mysteriously bad for the teeth. I had one snap off at Novacon way back. Another proved unequal to the struggle with a water-chestnut mere hours before my first onstage appearance as a convention guest in Portland, Oregon. While everyone else was having fun in the bar, hapless Langford was stretched out in another of those torture chairs trying to avoid the deeply philosophical thought: "I am having root canal work at American prices." (The convention, bless them, paid for it.)

Wheeeeeeeeee

Frankly, it's a personal phobia. The nastiest horror story I ever wrote was cribbed directly from bad dreams about bicuspids. Even the huge pile of harmless teeth accumulated by the Tooth Fairy in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather gave me the creeps on first reading. And I'm trying really hard, while helpless in the dentist's chair, not to think of the story in Christopher Fowler's collection Uncut about a chap with a split tooth who (no don't think about it) slowly discovers the man in the white coat is a lunatic dental impersonator who argh argh argh ...

Wheeeeeeeeee.

Can he really be finished? Rinse, spit, credit card. Stagger into the street, nostalgic for SF stories where teeth are restored by nanotechnological magic. Of course, with my luck I'd get a batch of defective nano that dissolved me into grey goo or restructured my whole head into a single giant molar.


David Langford is haunted by the knowledge, gleaned from The X-Files, that The Tooth Is Out There.