#AlternateWars
Immortality Drug
(all wiki sauces, mmm)
Jon Michaud of The New Yorker wrote: "Imagine a substance with the combined worldwide value of cocaine and petroleum and you will have some idea of the power of melange."
Location:
planet Old North Australia "Norstrilia" and planet Arrakis "Dune"
Teams:
The Instrumentality of Man (Norstrilia,1964) vs The Landsraad Houses of the Imperium (Dune, 1965)
Players:
Norstrilia-Stroon vs Dune-Melange
Descriptions:
Stroon
The immensely wealthy planet Old North Australia ("Norstrilia") is the only place in the universe which produces the precious immortality drug "stroon". The Norstrilians cull their young in order to prevent overpopulation, and only those who pass the test of the "Garden of Death" are allowed to enter adulthood.
(QuangoNote: Stroon is harvested from sheep "suffering" from a condition similar and common to a few Instrumentality planets idiopathically causing gigantism in living organisms.)
Melange
In the series, the most essential and valuable commodity in the universe is melange, a drug that gives the user a longer life span, greater vitality, and heightened awareness. In some humans, the spice can also unlock prescience, a form of precognition based in genetics but made possible by use of the drug in larger dosages. By far the most important of prescience’s functions is that it makes safe and accurate interstellar travel possible. However, melange is also highly addictive, and withdrawal is fatal. Harvesting melange is also hazardous in the extreme, as its only known source is the harsh desert planet Arrakis, where its deposits are guarded by giant sandworms.
Quango Explanation:
The CIA/FBI/NSA/ETC read Moby Dick and set out to create a custom pro-capital friendly version which would influence 12 to 32 year olds.
Quango Note:
Both the "Instrumentality" and the "Dune" series can be said to exist before the official publication dates (way before in the case of Instrumentality) as novelisations, so giving the date of pub of the relevant novels is only meant as a guide.
wiki
... "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale" was published in 1851 (QN: and the most famous screen-adaptation came out in 1956) ...
... Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 epic biographical drama film ... It was based on the life of T. E. Lawrence and his 1926 book Seven Pillars of Wisdom (also known as Revolt in the Desert) ...
... Spartacus is a 1951 historical novel by American writer Howard Fast. It is about the historic slave revolt led by Spartacus around 71 BC. The book inspired the 1960 film directed by Stanley Kubrick ...
... Spartacus, 1931 novel by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon ...
... The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler's 1939 novel on Spartacus ...
... The Order of Assassins (Arabic: حَشّاشِین, romanized: Ḥaššāšīyīn; Persian: حشاشين, romanized: Haššāšīn) was a Nizari Isma'ili Shia Islamic military order founded by Hasan-i Sabbah in 1090. Based out of the Nizari Isma'ili state, which comprised a network of mountain castles in Persia and Syria, they conducted several high-profile assassinations throughout the Levant during the Crusades. The Assassins held a strict subterfuge policy in the region and are believed to have killed hundreds of people who were deemed enemies of their state over the course of 200 years, including other Shias (the Fatimids), as well as Sunnis (the Abbasids and Seljuks) and Christians (the Crusaders) alike ...
... the word hashish, supposedly referring to the order's tactics and a common but contested belief that many of their assassinations were carried out by individuals under the influence of the drug ...