Month: November 2012

Trope-a-Day: Earth is the Center of the Universe

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Earth is the Center of the Universe: Severely averted.  Earth is an unknown backwater somewhere out beyond the ass end of the Periphery, and has all the galactopolitical significance you would expect a world which, having once reached its own moon, gives up on space travel beyond its own orbit entirely to have.  In other words: none at all.

(The only revelation that might change this even a little is that it’s evidently the planet that the Precursors got Pseudoeldrae archaea and the rest of the greenlife family from.  But, honestly, even that’s mostly only going to be of interest to biologists.)

Trope-a-Day: Eagle Squadron

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Eagle Squadron: The Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic often play this role for various libertist movements in one part of the Associated Worlds or another, strictly freelance, of course, as do some related groups for more specific issues (AI freedom, for example).  They are relatively picky about who they support (given the number of times people want to overthrow the oppressors in order to become just as bad, oppression-wise), but still, it happens enough.

It’s still disappointing an annoying amount of the time.

Vignettes of the Star Empire

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[Eldraeverse #1 Cover]I haz a book!

(As you can see from the addition of the “My Books” tab up above, no doubt.)

And you can find it on Amazon here, for Kindle, right now – over 44,000 words of nanofiction and metafiction from the Associated Worlds SF universe for the modest price of $2.99.

Buy a copy!  Buy ten copies!  Tell your friends, and make them buy ten copies, too!

But, no, seriously.  Vignettes of the Star Empire, the first collection of the nanofiction and metafiction which I’ve been writing (and including a couple of pieces not seen on t’blog) is now available as a Kindle e-book, all edited and polished and in its final canonical form.  For those of you who would prefer a physical book, that one’s not quite ready yet, but should also be available soon.  Not that you should let that stop you from buying an e-book copy too, of course.  Ahem.

Enjoy!

Trope-a-Day: Eagleland^WStarland

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Eagleland Starland: i.e., the equivalent of the Eagleland trope from a different perspective, because when viewed from the outside, the Empire comes in different flavors, too.

Flavor 1: The Empire’s sense of itself, of course, which it’s happy to export, can only be compared to America’s most fulsome sense of itself in the Fifties.  Turned up to eleven.

Which is to say that the Empire of the Star, renowned as the bright center of the universe, is a proud star nation of wise and idealistic gentlesophs of many species and postspecies striding boldly together into the future, residing in a mostly-post-scarcity Utopia built around honor and freedom and wealth and progress, where anyone can build a new life for themselves in the homey, yet ultratech, extravagant, and sometimes almost saccharine land where taxes really are consensual, death’s been abolished, and they’re going to make a damn good try at knocking off universal entropy just as soon as they can find the lever.  It is the best of times in the best of all possible places, the Imperial Dream (q.v.) is ready and waiting for anyone who seeks it in good faith, and they’re just waiting for you to come and join in.

Flavor 2: A star nation made up of roughly one-third pleasure-addled hedonists who are congenitally incapable of taking anything seriously, one-third mad scientists who think ethics is for sissies and that disassembling the Universe while they’re in it sounds like a good idea, and one-third ideological libertist fanatics with a Plan, liberally admixed with crazed machine-cultists, and who are all appallingly smug, stomp around the rest of the galaxy as if they owned the place and had the right to do anything they damn well pleased, talk like they invented every concept worth having, and look down their excessively refined noses at everything that displeases them… which is everything!  May also turn out to be trigger-happy cowboys when something offends their sensibilities enough.

Mixed Flavor: As in the case of the original, a realistic assessment would point out that while they’re not nearly quite as perfect as Flavor 1 portrays them, they’re also nowhere near as bad as Flavor 2, and it’s generally in the vices-of-their-virtues sense.  The Imperials are, it would be fair to say, proud verging on arrogant, overconfident, tremendously idealistic, a touch oversophisticated, disinclined to accept the legitimacy of many kinds of authorities, and tend, when abroad, to not really hide their reaction to being confronted with the appalling squalor – to their eyes – of all too many scarcity economies nearly as well as they might wish to.

But on the other hand, they are also by and large polite, appreciative, generous, helpful – not that that’s always a good thing – and fundamentally good-natured underneath it all.  So.

Trope-a-Day: Imperial Dream

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Imperial Dream: Ah, yes, the Imperial Dream.  Eudaimonia, or the “exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life according them scope” as Aristotle put it.  Which scope, it is generally said, is afforded by the Empire being a place where – to steal a perfectly good quotation from Bioshock – “a man is entitled to the sweat of his brow, the artist does not fear the censor, the scientist is not bound by petty morality, the great are not constrained by the small”, etc., etc., there are limitless possibilities and opportunities for anyone with the wit to seize them or make them, and everyone is unbound to pursue their personal growth, prosperity, and general awesomeness without having the rest of the crabs in the bucket drag them down.  Success may not be guaranteed, but everyone will get out of your way and let you try.

(This is for values of “petty morality” equal to “small-minded parochialism and choice-stealing dogooderism” and small equal to “the envious, the power-hungry, petty jobsworths, the fearful and cowardly, Luddites, regressives, and other fluffers of regress and relative status hierarchies”, of course.)

Depending on the exact point of view of the person having it, may also have elements in common with the American Dream, the Former Galactic Empire Dream (‘richness, wildness, no taxes”), and the Ankh-Morporkian Dream (“making boatloads of cash in a place where your death was not likely to be a matter of public policy”).

Cynics, of course, point out the dark side.  The Empire is a wonderful place if you happen to be the right sort of ambitious, self-motivated, self-defining, run-through-life-without-a-guidebook, make-it-up-as-you-go-along soph, because that’s who it was built by and for.  On the other hand, if you don’t fit that category, and/or need a bunch of expectations and norms and rules and conformity to define yourself by, going there is treating yourself to an anomic hell which will run you right over and into the ground, and almost certainly not even notice that it’s doing it.

Trope-a-Day: Dying Town

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Dying Town: Briefly applicable in the Empire in the time period between the Industrial Revolution and the Automation Revolution.  After the former, there was flight from plenty of small towns into the cities, to concentrate labor for the needs of industry and as agricultural labor requirements went down, and because of the cities being the centers of education and culture and production, much like today.

Then the Automation Revolution (and mature information technology) came along, and this trend abruptly reversed itself, as industrial labor requirements also dropped precipitately (meaning both that the remaining types of work were much more flexible as to location, and that much smaller populations could support industry), mature infotech could bring all that education and culture to you wherever you were or take you to it via telepresence, and modern robotized delivery systems could do much the same for production – and fast automated transit could still get you into the cities for anything that you needed to be there for.

And it turns out, for the eldrae at least, if there’s not a reason to make people live all tightly packed together in huge numbers, they pretty much don’t want to.  (At least not if they can still have all the good things about city delivered or a short flitter-hop away.)  Former dying towns are the new suburbs.

English and English

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As you may be aware, while I live in the US now, I’m originally from the UK.  As such, part of the editing process we’re currently going through here is checking carefully through the manuscript for the occasional British English spelling that may have slipped through my ongoing process of acculturation.

With one exception.

See, “humor” and “honor” and “color” look right to me, now.  Ending words with “-ize”?  No problem!  Single-ell “traveler” and double-ell “skillful”, “-er”-ing my “-re”s, all now acquired habits.  I can even deal with “maneuver” and “aluminum”, much though my family might disown me for it.

But I just can’t spell it “sulfide”.  Or, indeed, “sulfur”.  Can’t.  Won’t.  The line must be drawn here, because this is the one place where – six years after moving here – our orthography still makes my eyeballs bleed.

So that particular exception is going to be stetted.  I feel no shame.

Trope-a-Day: Dying Race

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Dying Race: Generally averted; biotech is pretty good these days, and most of the time, a sophont race that has, for some reason, ended up in this sort of decline can – with much difficulty and investment, or at least charity – have that fixed.  Or at least preserve themselves through some sort of technical intervention.

Only generally averted, though; there are a few minor examples – although, really, most of them are more like the virtual civilization to nadir of the Cordai Gap, and aren’t so much a dying race as a suicidal race, who are pretty much dying out through sheer ennui.  (Or so it is thought via external measurements of computational activity.)

Nice Labcoat

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Gentlesophs,

I have noted with interest several papers published in recent issues of the Journal, and in the Journal of Cliodynamics, addressing the widely observed increasing correlation between intelligence/education level and attractiveness/desirability for sexual encounters and pair-bonding in many species which have recently joined the galactic community. See, for example, Relationship Structures and Educational Achievement: A Correlation (ni Finyet an Karím & Claves-ith-Lelad, JoTM, v. 1966); Rising Pan-Worlds Cultural Features of the 4th Millennium (Corel-ith-Coreliar, 0xAAD4692F & Emerald Flourish in E, Imperial Journal of Memetic Science, v. 2210); Sapiosexuality and Assortative Mating (Sev Mar Dinét, Sev Dal Rídan, & viSeruaz, JoC, v. 1265); A Study of Cross-Species Desirability Signifiers (Cullet ra Seddan, viHalruaz, & Toltes, JoTM, v. 1966); and Ain’t Science Sexy? (mor-Vivek & mor-Estaeum, JoTM, v. 1964).

While the majority of these papers merely note the existence of the correlation and refrain from speculation on its cause, I would like to note an obvious hypothesis: memeticists, whether theoretical or practical, tend to be among the high-intelligence and high-education demographics in their respective societies; and among many species, high-level education takes place in a part of the lifecycle that also holds the peak of sexual and pair-bonding activity.

In short, the correlation is a result of exposure of new societies to the mutated remnant memeplex produced by millions of past students’ half-baked unofficial projects in applied memetics, and the first cohorts of students from those societies spinning up such projects of their own.

While at the moment the chief support for this hypothesis is an informal poll of my departmental colleagues and our reminiscences of our student days, we are now actively seeking funding for a formal study of the phenomenon. Interested parties should contact us through the University.

Academician Cordáne Calaris-ith-Calir, Landing University, Viëlle

– letter to the Journal of Theoretical Memetics

Trope-a-Day: Duel to the Death

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Duel To The Death: Available, but strongly discouraged (after all, Immortal Life Is Really Damned Expensive), unlike duels to the non-death – or, in the modern era, to rephrase that, duels to the permadeath are this, and duels to the death are, well, more permitted since death is not permanent, as a rule.

Nonetheless, permitted under certain constrained circumstances, including the same not while you retain any open commitments clause that covers voluntary suicide, because sometimes when two people really genuinely cannot tolerate each other’s existence – well, what else can you do?  Do you want a moment of agony, or an entire history of ache?

Trope-a-Day: Immortal Life is Cheap

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Immortal Life Is Cheap: This might be the case in the noetic-backup-having modern world – and to some degree is, when one can send deliberately-disposable temporary forks of yourself in designed-for-the-situation temporary bodies into dangerous situations, and suchlike – but the cultural attitudes were formed back in the day when immortality was still just Type II Undying, and law and custom haven’t been altered.

And in Type II Undying-land, immortal life is very expensive indeed, especially since healing and regeneration weren’t always as effective as they are in the modern era.  It is from this period that eldraeic, and hence Imperial, law got its truly draconian attitudes on the topics of murder (because you’re removing a lot more life from an immortal than you are from an ephemeral, not that the penalty is any different if you happen to kill an ephemeral), battery (again, because your victim has to live with the damage for a damn long time), torture and rape (because your victim has to live with the trauma for a damn long time).

Which, to bring this full circle, probably does mean that Immortal Criminal Life is Cheap, because truly draconian in these cases generally means “being made dead”.