Darwin’s Children

Voldemort has nothing to do with Charles Darwin, or Greg Bear, but he has no nose.

Darwin’s Children, scifi book by Greg Bear, 2003

Children communicate by using psychoactive chemical scents made from their own bodies. A beautiful twist on the idea that smell is a vestigial organ or perception. At one point, a boy consciously secretes from his own body a mind-controlling scent, wipes it on sheets of paper, crumples them up and throws them at the seat next kidnapping bus-driver, who becomes overtaken by the boy’s vaporous emissions.