“Cordon sanitaire” is a sanitary cordon used to confine the infected with a highly contagious and deadly disease to a specific area, quarantining them away from the general population until everyone inside either dies or survives, allowing the disease to die out. This technique has been around for centuries. Photos are available recording how the cordon was implemented in Honolulu’s Chinatown in an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1889. In August 2014 cordons were used in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia – the African countries most affected by Ebola.

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Anyone not familiar with the Mars Needs Women trope, it’s a society that lacks women and therefore needs to obtain them from elsewhere in order to procreate and avoid extinction. How those societies come about in fiction is rarely explained in any real detail.

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