mutant n.

Evolution had done its worst as far as he was concerned. Everything about him was unhuman, from the tough warty skin that inclosed him, through the rubbery dangling fingers…. Lorn must have been a mutant, somewhere in the earlier generations, that had bred true and increased its divergence from generation to generation.

Was this girl, too, a mutant, a variant of some species other than human, who had through mere chance adopted a perfect human form?

I am what you have made me—the ultimate of that one sensitive mutant.

And yet I have, even in age, one source of joy. Man no longer calls me the ‘strange mutant’. My card reads simply: ‘Niedbalski’—the name of the man I love.

Muller, of the University of Texas, has demonstrated that gene-patterns can be greatly altered by radiation, and that the offspring of parents so treated will differ greatly from their parents in bodily form. That accident produced an entirely new gene-pattern in the parents of this child, one which developed their child into a winged human. He’s what biologists technically call a mutant.

Was it possible that he, himself, might be a latent mutant? And that the mutation could become dominant under certain conditions—and use supranormal powers?

A number of wooden panels with sayings…burnt into them… Blessed is the norm, and… Watch thou for the mutant!

We have a girl here who can apparently read minds—a mutant, obviously.

He was something else, something she was unfamiliar with. A mutant.

For fifty years squatters had haunted MIMIC. They ate whatever they could find in its cupboards, sold whatever they could scavenge. It was squatters who had promoted the myth of radiation-spawned mutants.

The first film…concerned a team of ‘mutants’—creatures who, more often than not, resemble human beings, but each of whom possesses an unusual or protuberant talent.

‘Shuri, look! I can literally read the stories in the Djalia through my hands! I never knew my mutant powers could do something like this!’ ‘I’m glad you’ve finally found yourself, Muti, but we’ve got more immediate concerns!’ ‘Right, right. Giant space bug.’