Month: October 2014

Trope-a-Day: In The Future People Will Be One Race

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In The Future Humans People Will Be One Race: Averted.  It is perhaps possible (as the original trope points out) for this to happen naturally over a long enough time scale, but even the possible candidates for sticking around long enough for that timescale have generally taken to inventing about a thousand variations on their basic colors, shapes, and aesthetics long before arriving there.  Essentially, black and white are never going to naturally merge into beige so long as people are out there adding turquoise, ebony, gold-tinted, argent-blue, heliotrope and fur-covered to the gene pool.  And even if they did, someone would undoubtedly resurrect at least the look of the old phenotype for artistic purposes, if nothing else.

(Eldraeic racial divergence, while small to begin with and not manifesting phenotypically in the same ways ours does – due to a very small original gene pool, bioengineering, two bottlenecks, and more bioengineering – increased dramatically once they started inventing new ones all on their own.)

[The comment thread on the original posting of this trope read:

Comment: “Even if you mingled the current world gene pool thoroughly and didn’t tinker with the gene pool, there would STILL be substantial colour variations – there are some great twin photos out there showing what happens when one twin gets all the light genes and the other gets all the dark ones.”

Reply: “That’s true in the short, medium and long term, as the trope page points out – and, indeed, I’ve seen plenty of those Brazilian family pictures – but over the very long term?  One imagines once the alleles get scrambled enough the light/dark extremes are going to be pushed right out to the very ends of the probability curve, even without fixation.”]

Do You Want to Change the World?

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“If you want to learn how to make worlds, come to the University of Talentar.

Our rusty world and its youthful wine-dark – and wine-colored, red as a fine Vintiver port – seas have been the test-bed for every ecopoetic technique in the manual. Since first Copperfall, we’ve changed the face of the eutalentic world we found in more ways than we can count.

Comet herders have brought ice, nitrate, and clotted carbon from the far Shards to fill its oceans and thicken its air. Vast soletta arrays and deep thermal boreholes warm the new waters and melt the polar caps, while canals, carved in an instant by nucleonic cutters, open up crater lakes and let them flow freely across its face. Now-ancient bacteria break up oxides for breathable air, and leach ammonia and methane, too, into the building atmosphere.

A nanoecology of mechal elementals now thrives across the world. Blackeners and smart clouds tune the planetary albedo; high in the stratosphere, self-replicating haze absorbs harmful excesses of ultraviolet light. Warming rods capture solar heat and conduct it deep into the ground to free the permafrost. Aerator swarms stir up the regolith and break up the hardpans. Landcorals, saltshapers, and exotic cyborg lichen thrive in the badlands, locking up salts unwanted by later stages of the planned evolution.

Meanwhile, the bioecology spreads in their wake. Miritar plants, crafted to thrive on that barely-modified regolith, bind the dunes and eat halogens, releasing potent greenhouse gases to warm the world. Behind them advance the dirt farmers, brewing true soil in all its microbial subtlety, such that true plants and animals can thrive – both those hardy imports that can survive, and neogens made specifically for the new world, designed to take their place in the ecological web being woven by the ecotects, the mezuar treeherders and selyéva gardeners. Bigenetic organisms, plants and animals sharing a common genome and producing each other’s seeds, spread life across the new living wilderness. In all but the highest of cold highlands, the rieltelir-modified may walk freely outside without masks – and could do so everywhere did our design not wish to retain those highlands.

Our world is where ecopoesis began; it’s where ecopoesis has made most progress; and it’s where you can get hands-on experience with every aspect of every stage of the process.

And ecopoesis, too, is an ever-growing art and industry. The Worlds are expanding faster every year, and of all the new planets discovered, the majority of those considered potentially habitable are eutalentic, in need of the helping hand of a talented ecotect and crew.

Contact us today for details of our introductory and advanced courses.”

– voiceover for an advertisement published by the U. T. Faculty of Megascale Ergetics

[P.S. If any talented artist/videographer types are interested in making the video for which this is the voiceover, please do contact me. I usually hesitate to include notes like this, but I can see the imagery in my head, and it is awesome.]

Trope-a-Day: The Internet Is For Porn

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The Internet Is For Porn: No, no, no.  The Empire’s cultural values see to that.  The Internet is for really awfully high-class erotic literature, watchvids, InVids, slinkies, and other media.

Now, the galactic extranet, a lot of that is for porn.  Or at least you think it’s porn – translation difficulties being what they are, and given the number of species and therefore possible combinations out there.  In any case, if you’re extending your porn search to the extranet, be careful of your filters, lest you find yourself curling up into a little ball on the floor and muttering “My gods, the ovipositor!” over and over again.  Verb. sap., eh?

Trope-a-Day: Internal Affairs

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Internal Affairs: Threefold, actually, in the form of the Threefold Auditors of Impropriety, three departments only united at the level of the Stellar Council which audit the entire Imperial Service, including both the Watch Constabulary and the Imperial Military Service.

In addition to the different institutional perspectives deliberately maintained by the three different departments (the Offices of Internal Audit, Service Security, and Censorious Scrutiny), this is an attempt to square the circle implied by Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – the Threefold Auditors audit each other with, if anything, even more vigor than they apply to keeping the rest of the Service on the straight and narrow.

Trope-a-Day: Intergenerational Friendship

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Intergenerational Friendship: Ubiquitous in Imperial society, given both how very long lifespan is compared to generation (any given generation is a small demographic segment indeed, and therefore… and besides, after the first century or so, does it really matter?).

And also the low birthrate mentioned under Immortal Procreation Clause meaning that if you’re the kid in town, chances are that you’re the kid in town.  Children socialize with older generations because that’s the only socialization going on.

Improvisation Kills

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It is a truism of celestial warfare that among the most valuable targets to seize in the course of a major planetary assault operation is the primary planetary starport or local starports close to the  intended target(s) of the operation. Starports, for all the obvious reasons, make perfect orbitheads, offering existing facilities eminently suitable for the landing and disembarkation of troops and materiel in quantity. (Orbital elevators, by contrast, are usually considered too fragile and susceptible to sabotage for this purpose, if the enemy are willing to absorb the ensuing damage to their own planet, until the orbitals and the continental area surrounding the elevator have been entirely secured.)

Why, then, are combat drops rarely, if ever, targeted at the vicinity of starports?

Again, it is important to remember that which is unseen. The popular image of starports is heavily biased towards the facilities for ground-landing starships – understandably, since the giant launch/landing pads built to handle nucleonic-thermal ships, with their blast-deflecting berms, “hot” shafts, and motile structures are some of the most impressive structures ever built – and towards the shuttleport terminals used by commuters and starship passengers alike. Nonetheless, the majority of cargo in the developed Worlds is carried by dedicated spacecraft incapable of atmospheric landing, to and from which cargo is transp0rted in high volumes using suitably cheap methods: either laser-launch/deceleration facilities, mass drivers, or both, in which case the former handles light or delicate cargo and the latter hardbulk.

What this means in military terms is that, any other defense grid aside, the majority of starports in the developed Worlds have at their disposal a multi-gigawatt-range phased-array laser system, and/or a pair of mass drivers capable of accelerating a solid slug the size of a shipping container (or, equally effective, a shipping container packed with rubble or cheap heavy-metal ingots) to orbital velocities – both, admittedly, equipped with safety systems designed to prevent them from being used in exactly the manner which is desirable for military purposes, but that is something usually corrected readily enough by a software change – along with all the high-resolution traffic-control sensor equipment needed to target them effectively.

It is also a truism of warfare in general that one shouldn’t stab a heavily-armed man in the front. That is doubly relevant when the things they’re using as weapons are also the value that you want to capture.

– Elementary Principles of Orbit-to-Ground Maneuver Plans, pub. INI Press

Trope-a-Day: Intelligent Gerbil

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Intelligent Gerbil: I’m working really hard to avert this one, except – quite – in the case of the uplifts (in whose case, retaining the mental characteristics of its animal ancestors that are compatible with sophoncy and civilization is half the point; in a world in which data is trivially shared, different points of view become one of the most important commodities).

Air Ain’t Free

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“Charges in place? Conduits sealed? Okay, go ahead and open it up.”

The heavy wrench descending, clangingly, on the sealed emergency hatch once, twice, three times before the seal broke, a wave of fouled air rushing out past the linobir enforcer and hsis men. Beyond, the milling crowd, faces pale and dark and congested with nerves, eyed them uneasily and decided not to make a break for it.

“All right, which of you self-fuckin’ dock-rats claims t’be in charge of this section?” hse bellowed. “He’s got some things to ‘splain and so have I. Speak out, if breathin’ this crud hasn’t rotted your brains too much to parse plain Trade.”

Hser eye fell on a pair of scruffy deshnik arguing with one of his men, brandishing a smart-paper token.

“She’s got a pass? Any of the rest of you recognize this one?”

“Sure, boss, up on Thirty with the Torashanika clan.”

“Then get out of here – Just you, kid. He ain’t got a pass… No arguin’. You got three choices. You can stay here and kiss space with the rest of ‘em when their time comes, or you can run back to your clan-group and try an’ talk ‘em into buying out his life-debt.” Not that there was much chance of even a desperate clan-group doing that for a casteless deshnika flesh-peddler. “Or you can try and get past me an’ I’ll paint the deckhead with your brains. Estrev always gets his cut; no exceptions.”

“Listen up, the rest of you clut-grubbers! I speak for the drift-estrev, and the drift-estrev is not happy. You’re breathin’ his air and burnin’ his bunkerage, and what’s he getting back from you? Nothin’ but dioxide, taint, and an infestation of this pink shit.”

The linobir kicked at a squirming tendril of the ubiquitous hab-slime with a mid-limb.

“Now the estrev says you’ve got two cycles to pay off your life-debts and figure out how to make him value your worthless selves, or else I get to take the four pounds of trinol packed into these joints and blow your shit-house sewerslum right off station-end. Tell whoever’s hidin’ back there and breathe deep while y’can.”

“Close it up, boys. Message delivered.”

Trope-a-Day: Institutional Apparel

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Institutional Apparel: Averted.  Pre-conviction, while the Empire will confine the accused, they don’t own the accused, who may, after all, be innocent as the day is long.  So they get to keep their own clothing and other perquisites until the trial is done.

(Post-conviction, since the Imperials don’t use prison as a punishment – it being horribly inhumane – the prisoner proceeds quickly enough to the cashier, the memetic reconditioner, the euthanatrist, or the executioner that Institutional Apparel would be unnecessary.)

Trope-a-Day: Instant Emergency Response

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Instant Emergency Response: As a side effect of the AI monitors on the raw feed mentioned under Big Brother Is Watching, which both make sure response is dispatched to observed crimes and accidents as they happen, and which are happy to use predictive algorithms to make sure that it’s in place before they happen; and inasmuch as the various emergency services have widely distributed robot hotels to make sure that they can at least get cybershell feet or wing on the ground very rapidly, emergency response is very rapid, and most of the time, you don’t need to explicitly call it in if you’re in public.

Trope-a-Day: Instant AI, Just Add Water

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Instant AI, Just Add Water: Was once true in the old days, back when people were quite often using mental modules scanned, compiled, and tweaked from brain-scans of biosapiences in their AI architectures.  The logos/personality organization algorithm is pretty damn resilient, and often such inexpertly designed modules carried at least a chunk of it along with them in the scan, and it doesn’t take much for it to at least start a self-development cascade.

But they’re much better at mental architecture design and coding from scratch these days, and don’t let logoi creep in unless they actually intend for them to be there.

(The “if you wake up, please call this number to let us know and claim your sophont rights” code-package is still included in all AI seeds just in case, though.)

Food & Humor

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It’s question-answering time here at the Eldraeverse! A reader writes:

Two questions-

1) Is there a food item for the Eldrae that has assumed the same memetic status as bacon for humans?

2) What do the Eldrae find funny?  What human comedians, if they were to go on tour in Eldrae territory, would do well and which ones would starve?

Thank you!

1. Well, if there is, I don’t know about it yet, and since nothing’s immediately leapt out of my imagination and made me say, “aha, this must be it”, I think I’m going to have to preserve my future authorial maneuvering room on that one, sorry.

On the other hand, there’s at least some reason to suspect there might not be.

Top of that list is mass. We’re one planet of seven billions, and I might be inclined to quibble a little with “for humans”, inasmuch as the bacon meme has spread mostly among the cultural intersection of the Anglosphere and the Internet-connected world, which while a lot of the planet isn’t quite all of it.

This limiting effect is only multiplied when they’re 250-odd star systems plus a scattering of ecumenical colonies, outposts, and exclaves, and those in the core, at least, are rather more heavily populated than ours. Throw in cultural groupings caused by light-lag, differences in diet across different worlds, and that common culture is both (a) polyspecific, including species that can’t eat the same food period, and (b) more diverse at baseline, due to the lack of the peer-norming instinct humans have, and while memes certainly do catch fire and grow explosively *there* – aided by high-speed Internet-equivalent connections being universal – they have to be ridiculously virulent in order to capture a statistically huge chunk of that population.

I’m sure more local versions of it come and go all the time, though.

2. Argh. Well, that’s not a tricky question for me with respect to *there* , but it is with respect to *here* – namely, I’m not adequately familiar with real-world comedians to even begin to come up with a list.

So here are some general comments on what Imperial-culture humor is like, and then hopefully you can take it from there –

Things that work:

  • By and large, the majority of their sense of humor is dry. Very dry. Possibly dehydrated.
  • Irony never fails. Snark is practically impossible to resist.
  • Likewise, wit and intellectual humor always go down well, and the more levels it works on, the better 1.
  • So does surrealism and absurdity. So, to break my rule and name a name, Monty Python would probably play well.
  • Situational comedy can work, as long as the humor derives from the situation and/or the interaction between the characters, and isn’t specifically targeted at one or all of them.
  • Black and gallows humor are also generally accepted: in the sorts of situations that lead to them, laughter is, they deem, one of the civilized responses to entropy.

Note: Even if it sounds it to some degree, none of this is necessarily what we would call “high-brow”. On a number of the criteria above, something like, oh, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum would probably work.

Things that don’t work:

  • Humor that depends on laughing at someone’s pain, misfortune, humiliation, or embarrassment. That’s just perverse. The modal human clearly has something wrong with its empathy-sympathy wiring.
  • Note: So, to give an example of how this works in practice, you can have something like a traditional romantic comedy because while there is pain and embarrassment, etc., along the way, there’s also a happy ending and you’re notionally looking back with the protagonists narrating the story and laughing with them at the tangled path and difficulties that they overcame to get to said ending. If there wasn’t that payoff at the end, none of it would be funny. (So, there go most of the sitcoms that go for the cheap laughs…)
  • Also, as a related category, all the humor that depends on the protagonist screwing up repeatedly or just plain being a screw-up. Incompetence isn’t funny. Incompetence (in space, and the spacer-culture attitude on this is pervasive) gets people killed in winnows.
  • Humor targeted at (in the sense of “laughing at”) individuals or groups. Individuals, for all the reasons above, inasmuch as it’s usually intended to humiliate or embarrass. (And this is a culture which, natively, has essentially no concept of a “friendly insult”.)
  • And groups because humor that makes fun of the out-group (or, hell, even the in-group) directly or by treating their characteristics as a source of humor depends on the peer-norming instinct that leads humans and other species that have it to see deviations from the majority-norm as somehow wrong. Eldrae don’t have that and they encourage other people not to have that either.
  • Exception: You can do this when the target is one of the short list of Universally Acknowledged Acceptable Targets: “Ah, Yes, The People” achieved its high box-office despite/because of being a black-toned satire of galactic politicians because politicians and the politically-minded have earned it. In this case, the viciousness of the targeting and the laughing-at-them nature of the beast is entirely intentional because being righteously despised by all decent folks is the mélith the political and politically-minded have earned by being a bunch of scum-sucking slaver-cultist swine in the first place. You’re allowed to take the piss out of the Iltines or the Galians, too, because everyone can righteously hate Space Fascists and brutal theocrats, too, but this is very much not the sort of thing one can aim at mere honorable opponents 2; it’s basically insulting them by refusing to take them seriously. To fall under this exception, you have to be dishonorable, disgusting, and completely outside the pale where civilized society is concerned; people can be wrong without being Bad People, and only Bad People qualify, so it’s a really short list.
  • Self-deprecation is mostly considered annoying 3.
  • Shock comedy is an utter fail. In approximate order:
  • Scatology (and other “gross-out humor”) fails because poop, really? If you’re building recycling systems to cope with your excreta and still find them funny, something’s gone wrong with your cultural evolution somewhere.
  • I’d say that of sexual humor, but that’s not entirely true. They do have a perfectly good “light-hearted erotica” genre. On the other hand, Eldraeic follows the Culture’s Marain in having a single word per kind of genitalia that suffices for all uses 4, so you can’t derive humor from the million euphemisms we insist on using, and the words have basically no shock value. If you go into the food court and yell “penis!”, the strongest reaction you’ll get is along the lines of “What? Where?” The problem with much sexual humor as we define it is that it depends on your society having a giant bug up its ass about sex in the first place, so, yeah, falls rather flat.
  • Basically, the trouble with transgressive humor 5 in a libertist society is that you’ve got some real problems finding taboos to transgress, and when you do, you’re find that you’ve either successfully adopted the posture of the poop-flinging monkey 6 or else that of the dude who loves rape and Holocaust jokes, and not only should that shit not be funny, but per reasons mentioned above, basically never is.

1. Dear gods, the puns.

2. If they had elections, using “attack ads” in this style to mock one’s opponent would be a swift ticket to lose the election by way of depriving oneself of decent chaphood. Of course, if they didn’t like your opponent either, you might lose the election to None Of The Above, but there ain’t no way they’d let you win.

3. Pride is a virtue, humility is not.

4. See endnote in the back of which book I don’t remember. Consider Phlebas, maybe?

5. “Transgressive” art forms generally also fail epically. Violating the rules to achieve an interesting effect is interesting. Violating the rules just to shock – here’s a nickel, kid, you’ve learned to create ugliness. Now get your cacophilic ass out of my gallery. Don’t come back.

6. It also tends to be a staple of those who want to use it for, um, political ends, and as a society that prizes coválír – rationalism – that sort of thing gets you a straight out “shut up, moron, the adults in the room are talking”.

Trope-a-Day: In Space Everyone Can See Your Face

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In Space Everyone Can See Your Face: Averted, for all the practical reasons mentioned.  In practice, augmented reality v-tags – actually, the standard public identity tag – tell you who is who, and those who want to can use supplementary v-tags to indicate their current emotional state, etc., and perform other expressive tasks.

(The running lights on spacecraft also mentioned?  There for close orbital operations and for the benefit of the crew when they have to go clamber about on the hull to do maintenance, including such things as delineating the – very hot – radiative striping so you don’t accidentally step on it.  You can turn it off quite happily outside those circumstances, although a lot of captains don’t simply because with the energy budget of your average modern spacecraft1, there’s really no point in making the trivial saving of turning the lights off.  Besides, someone might have a telescope aimed at you, and programming this gorgeous paint job wasn’t cheap, y’know?)

1. i.e., running on fusion, with thus-generous power budget. This was not the historical case back in the fuel-cells-and-solar-panels days.

The Shibboleth of Science is “That’s Odd”

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“Academician. Academician.” The foundry master wiped his hands on his leather apron, and waved at the looming bulk in the back of the workshop. “Your sky-tube’s coming along to plan. Just got the wire-wrapping on today. The woodwright’s’ll be here tomorrow to get the quarter-boards on her, and your chymist seems satisfied. Though I’d appreciate it if you’d have him do the filling elsewhere; the way he was talking, that stuff you’re using shouldn’t be within a mile of our fire-works.”

“It shouldn’t, or most other places, indeed. We’ll not be filling her until we’re in place to fire her. And we should, then, be ready to take delivery by the 19th?”

“We’ll have her ready for you. What’s all this about, anyway? I’ve built the like before, but nothing half this large.”

“We’re going to find out where gravity breaks.”

“Ah…”

“It’s one of the more troubling problems in natural philosophy,” the second Academician put in. “The difference between Celestial and Terrestrial Gravitation. You see, ever since records began at the Starspike, and it was shown that…”

“We don’t need all three thousand years,” the first interrupted.

“Um, yes, anyway, after a lot of observation and even more theorizing, most of it wrong, the Starspike’s skywatchers figured out that the planets, and us, and the Shining One, and its planets, and all the moons are all moving around each other in lovely, sweeping ellipses as they fall together and always miss. And after much computation, Siao Callaneth produced his Lemmas and declared that if you postulate an attractive force that’s in proportion to their masses and inversely proportional to their distances, all the numbers come out right.”

“Yeah, but that’s true down here, too. We use his lemmas all the time in structures.”

“Ah, but it’s only true sometimes down here. Up there, if you assume that a world is a point, it works. Down here, if you assume that an object is a point –”

“If it’s homogenous, otherwise it’s an offset point.”

“If it’s homogenous, yes, thank you, it works. Between objects, if you have heavy objects and sensitive pendulums. But if you drop something here, what direction does it fall?”

“Down?”

“Down, yes. Straight down. And we’re not above the center of the world, are we?  But if we drop something, anywhere, it falls in a nice straight line perpendicular to Eliéra’s notionally-flat surface, even though the center of all the world’s mass is thousands of miles over there. It falls straight down here, it falls straight down in Mossstone, it falls straight down even in heathen Indimór-on-the-Rim, for all that the Lemmas say that the world’s gravity should drag everyone there sideways off their feet, if not crumple the edge of the world up like tissue paper, rock not being all that strong. And that is Terrestrial Gravitation, the damned exception that’s been inexplicable ever since the Shadow-watcher made note of it when proving the world was flat in the first place.”

“Eliéra behaves both ways, you see. Down here, things fall straight. But if it behaved that way celestially, we’d orbit – well, we wouldn’t move in one of those beautiful ellipses, and the moons probably wouldn’t stay up. Somewhere, if you go far enough up, everything changes. And watching Skybreaker here fly is going to tell us where.”

 

Trope-a-Day: Insistent Terminology

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Insistent Terminology: Happens fairly often, because nomenclature (among other things) is Serious Business, and one therefore – when dealing with people – should know that people earned those attributions, dammit, and that therefore not using them (or misusing them) amounts to a deliberate insult.  They would not, after all, presume to insult you by believing that you’re that socially incompetent.

And even when dealing with people’s property/inventions/jobs/works, while they do prefer to avoid euphemisms – because “refuse collector” is a perfectly honorable job that needs no excuses made for it, and the guy doing the SecDef’s job is the straight-out “Warlord of the Empire” even if his primary title is “First Lord of the Admiralty”, and “differently abled” is best avoided unless you want to experience the “what special powers did you think I got from losing a leg, you moron?” rant – a good politeness tip is to avoid all diminutives period.  Don’t use them on other people, because they’ll be interpreted as insults (and there’s no such thing as a friendly insult); don’t use them on yourself, because if it’s anything, it’s a weird species of self-hating fraud.

The ur-example of this, of course, is that while the runér will tolerate the name of their darëssef being misglossed as “noble” (after all, it’s a quality of character, as well as a feudal class), neither they nor the Senators or local Assemblymen or anyone else involved in government at any level will tolerate being referred to as a “politician”.  While that’s not a strict cognate to korásan either, it’s close enough – and with plenty of other undesirable and rather slimy overtones – to qualify as a fighting-words level insult and almost certainly a verbal Berserk Button.

The Empire doesn’t have politicians.  It has harmonizers, coordinators, synarchists, and maybe even managers, but no politicians.  Do not forget this.

Trope-a-Day: Insignificant Little Blue Planet

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Insignificant Little Blue Planet: We already really handled this under Earth is the Center of the Universe, but I bring it up because of a discussion at TV Tropes of the problem, religiously speaking, of being a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of something incomprehensibly large with regard to theologies that are quite personal in the relationship between Man and Cosmos.

To which I would like to note that the response of the rather impersonal, iconic, primary eldraeic religion to discovering Space was, approximately, “All of this needs fixing? Bugger me, that’s going to take a while.”

Higher than High

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An interrogation room on Gálish (Sullen Wildlands):

The local agents looked at each other, then back at my aquastor.

“So, your perp has stolen this, this -”

“Sixteen-petabit colonial tangle-channel ansible.”

“Whatever, this trillion-exval widget, and according to your numbers he’s now running a negative-frequency trading scam with it here?”

“On your quaint pre-stellar Second Tier Market? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, gentlesophs. If our UNSUB is after money, he’s cunning, devious, technically brilliant, and incredibly stupid. It’s probably safe to conclude, therefore, that he’s after something other than money.”

– from the lifelog of Nyr Alman, Market Liberty Oversight Directorate