Trope-a-Day: Spare Body Parts

Alistair Young

Nov 13, 2015

Spare Body Parts: The poster-people for this are the kaeth, who come from the kind of… robust ecology (see: Had to be Sharp) that makes a selection of extra backup organs very useful indeed. And a special shout-out goes to the myneni, who have a kind of this by default by virtue of forming all their organs ad hoc anyway.

Of course, it’s not like a lot of other species haven’t been merrily engineering redundancy into at least some clades of themselves in the name of extra resilience, starting with auxiliary hearts and working down, even if they can’t do the same sort of holistically comprehensive job…

← Trope-a-Day: Space Western | Trope-a-Day: Split Personality Merge →

Read more

Nom

“Consider, gentle reader, that even as the flesh of an Emperor, or of any man, is constituted of what he eats, so then is an Empire, in bones and sinew, constituted of what it eats. “Therefore, to maintain the health, and to avoid the manifestations of ill-nutrition, unseemly bloat, or

Shipshape

I saw this picture today, via an Astral Codex Ten post on distinguishing human art from AI art, but that is not the context in which I reference it: Instead, I merely point out that it would be an accurate representation of what the Royal Alatian (later Imperial) Navy would

My To-Fu Is Stronger Than Yours

Pressed bean curds are a common item in many Eliéran cuisines, in recipes both savory and sweet. I refer to them using this long description since, despite being identical in many ways and produced from the same small group of plants, they are one of the very few foodstuffs to

Crazy Eddie

As a brief cultural note, today, I happened to be looking something up on the Atomic Rockets Future Mythology page, and was reminded of Crazy Eddie. (The one from Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, obviously. Even if, sad to say, that