Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

Vanadium

50.9415

Vanadium

Vanadium is an extremely dull element. It is God's own couch potato. It

doesn't do much, and it rarely goes out. Vanadium never shows up at your

door in fabulous drag with a rental tuxedo in your size and invites you

to go out dancing with it in exclusive nightclubs into the wee hours of

the morning. Vanadium never snaps a tendon while climbing the Matterhorn

and falls twenty feet into the empty air, only to be saved by a

well-pounded piton and the skill of its companions. Vanadium never wins

the Nobel Prize for its work on behalf of refugee children and standing

before the King of Sweden breaks down in tears at the thought of how many

lives the prize money will save.

Vanadium is a nonferrous metal. Big whoop.

It's not as if all nonferrous metals are underachievers. Look at

platinum! Look at silver! Gold is, for Pete's sake, a noble element!

These are polished, achiever metals. They're welcome everywhere. They can

any one of them be seen dining with Sharon Stone in St. Croix, while Jack

Nicholson leans over the crisp white tablecloth with that signature leer

of his to make a sly joke. British cabinet members confer with them in

darkened Jacobean rooms redolent of single malt whisky, Cuban cigars, and

treason. They keep company with smugglers, with sheiks, with beautiful

women, with women who are almost beautiful but distinctly intriguing,

with women who were once beautiful and now have deliciously scandalous

pasts.

Not vanadium. Vanadium is the twenty-second most abundant element in the

Earth's crust, neither rare enough to be interesting nor common enough to

be ubiquitous. It was first commercially mined in Peru, which is

promising, and is used in producing rust-resistant steel for high-speed

tools, which is not. Vanadium foil is employed as a bonding agent for

cladding titanium to steel, and that pretty much says it all.

It does not burst into flames upon contact with the air.

Nor does it act to block gravity waves?a sphere covered in retractable

panels of vanadium will not shoot off into space, making interplanetary

travel swift and economical, even for Victorians. Nor does exposure to it

cause Superman to suffer unpredictable never-to-be-repeated side effects,

such as morbid obesity, or a compulsion to dress in women's clothing, or

turning into a vampire plant. It will give nobody the heightened senses

and disproportionate strength of a spider.

There is so little to be said in vanadium's favor! It is a soft and

ductile white metal. So what? Its boiling point is 3,450° Centigrade. Who

cares? It has no desirable properties and, worse, no ambition to achieve

any. There it is, and there it will stay. I've wasted more than enough

time on it already. I wash my hands of it forever!

Vanadium is an essential element in the diets of chickens.