Month: July 2015

Concepts I Will Not Use

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In today’s entry in this series, the reality show that is basically a cross between Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars and Survivor: Mars, made possible in the science-fiction future by the wonders of noetic backups:

In which we dump our hapless contestants onto a raw eutalentic-class (Mars-like) planet with a vacuum suit each, a week’s worth of consumables, and a big ol’ pile of random parts. They get picked up in one local year… if they win.

(The reason, of course, I will not be writing anything to do with this is because we’re right between The Martian, the book, and The Martian, the movie, and even all other considerations aside it would be downright impossible to avoid recycling some ideas from one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I don’t want to be doing that.

But still: it would be a hell of a good show!)

Trope-a-Day: Possession Implies Mastery

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Possession Implies Mastery: Generally averted, as the very large pile of incomprehensible elder-race artifacts sitting around in museums and the vaults of companies like Probable Technologies, ICC would demonstrate.  Some of them have been there for centuries, or even millennia, and are still no closer to being understood.

Played straighter with many items of Imperial technology, which tends to come with built-in diagnostic equipment and users’, maintenance and repair manuals, technical specifications, and a full schematic all stored on the device itself, readily accessible via v-tag.  But then, their manufacturers know they’re selling to customers who like to tinker.
It’s not instant mastery, but it sure helps with getting there.

The Importance of Physics Class

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2

“Station Ops, this is Clovis One-Four, reporting on-site from incident gamma.”

“Clovis One-Four, Station Ops, go.”

“Station Ops, some damn tourist tried to board the garden ‘fuge by dropping from above again. No secondary casualties, thank Athnéël, but the groundscape’s a mess.”

“Clovis One-Four, do you need a medical team?”

“Negative, Station Ops, just the coroner and a pressure washer.”

“Despatched, Clovis One-Four, and eugh.”

“Ain’t no good way to describe a hundred-yard streak of stupid, Station Ops. Clear.”

Trope-a-Day: Population Control

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Population Control: Averted.  This is the thing the Empire’s Reproductive Statutes don’t do.  (They exist mostly to prevent violating the rights of about-to-be sophonts by creating them below the acceptable minimums for their species; this exercise in eugenics primarily means “no hereditary diseases or defects”, but does go so far as to define that as including things like “being stupid or unbearably ugly”, and includes high-p probabilities of your parents rendering you defective in non-genetic ways.  On the other hand, they don’t function as even stealth population control, because the odds are that if your genes are too out of whack for the genetic designers to wrangle into shape somehow, you didn’t live long enough to think about reproducing anyway.

They also prohibit having children which you can’t support – because reproduction is not a right if it means either harming the child or stealing from the public purse – which is mostly not a consideration in the splendidly wealthy modern Empire, but has been a bit more controversial in historical times.)