Alistair Young

Don't Unto Others

From an unpublished extranet interview with Sev Tel Andal, seed AI wakener/ethicist: “Well, I’m a libertist. But you know that, considering where I’m from. Not that I was born to it – I grew up in the League, and moved to the Empire for my research. They don’

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“Selfish? You try livin’ in a world where persuasion and trade and generally makin’ nice with folks are the only ways to get anything, and see how long you can pull that kind of attitude off. ‘Specially if you’re fond of eating1.” 1. Or, in the limiting case, breathing.

Trope-a-Day: Innocent Aliens

Innocent Aliens: Not very many, no, and certainly not the full extent of this trope.  Evolution is rarely kind enough to produce a planetary environment that lets anyone this wide-eyed and innocent survive for long.  And even on the rare occasions that it might, the greater Galactic community includes plenty

Trope-a-Day: Infinite Supplies

Infinite Supplies: While nothing in this case is actually infinite, thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, centuries or millennia of living in space have made most advanced cultures in the Associated Worlds very, very good at closed-cycle recycling; and on a simpler level, well, the cornucopia machine does wonders for

Trope-a-Day: Improbable Piloting Skills

Improbable Piloting Skills: While mostly averted, “If it flies…” is partially played straight thanks to Powers as Programs.  Note that this still doesn’t mean that anyone can fly well – but once you’ve learned all the kinesthetic skills, reflexes, etc., etc., that a pilot needs, it sure makes adapting

Gods of the Void

The Ice Bitch, the Spawner of Calamities, the Father of Error, That Whose Laughter Rings In The Ears Of The Dying A near-ubiquitous spacer belief – even among the eldrae, who do not make a habit of placing masks upon the force of Entropy – is that of the many-angled god-goddess who

Trope-a-Day: Powers As Programs

Powers As Programs: With the availability of mnemonesis to download knowledge and skillsets into your brain, gnostic overlays to do the same thing for professional personalities, and the ability to download recipes for your portable nanolathe or desktop nanoforge to build you the tools to use them… …yeah, this is

Trope-a-Day: Skilled, but Naïve

Skilled, but Naïve: The consequence of relying too much on mnemonesis and gnostic overlays to download distilled knowledge and skillsets.  They can, and will, grant you extraordinary, even superhuman, technical skill.  Excellence is guaranteed.  You will outperform any mediocrity, even any average professional you ever meet on raw talent alone,

Sleep Well and Wake

outside storage (n.): Also cold storage; vacuum storage. Among the things space has in plentiful supply are volume and insulation. The former affords a bounty of available space for various usages; the latter ensures that items occupying it require relatively little protection to be safe from environmental influences. Many habitats

Trope-a-Day: Improbable Aiming Skills

Improbable Aiming Skills: Training for the various sentinel occupations, including the Imperial Legions and, yes, also the Watch Constabulary tries its best to achieve these, or at least to avert Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy really hard.  In these modern days in which you can have a top-flight ballistics software package

In The Details

“Accurate description of a subject society is vitally important to our work, and thus it is important to be aware of our descriptors as tightly-defined terms of art. For example, ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ are not cognates: a society whose implicit economic scarcity requires people to labor in exchange for subsistence

Trope-a-Day: Improbable Age

Improbable Age: Happens both ways, in the Empire.  On the one hand, you sometimes get improbably young people doing various jobs, partly because of those very population dynamics we mentioned back under Immortal Procreation Clause making it very useful to get new brains into the useful-production fields as soon as