“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
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
Immortal Procreation Clause: Somewhat played straight, but only somewhat. Eldraeic native fertility is considerably, about an order of magnitude, lower than human as a baseline, yes, but that’s not so much lower that they weren’t running a nice healthy population growth curve before discovering technology, space, etc. (and
Kythera System, near Lunar Transshipment One OTV Mucker’s Bucket LÃse Varavelen, captain-owner. “…object appears to be a fragment of nucleonic battery casing, damaged by internal explosion. Remaining piece bears serial code gilek-two-four-eleven-nine-one-illegible-corse. Further identity not confirmed. Object stowed aboard for return. Entry ends, mission elapsed time six, twenty-one, fourteen,
Immortality Immorality: Averted, inverted, mocked, beaten soundly, and left to expire if it wants to so damned much, in much of the Galaxy. The Imperials (and many other transsophont civilizations) are of the opinion that anyone who can’t tell that death is an eo ipso Bad Thing, meaningless, pointless,
Incredibly Obvious Bomb: In the Empire, this is the essential difference between a nuclear weapon – which is a specifically military purchase, and using which under most circumstances will have you up on capital Use of Instruments of Regrettable Necessity Without Appropriate Authority charges, and a nuclear device, which you can
KALATRI Biocode: O-LDL-D11 The kalatri, best known as the dominant sophont species of the Voniensa Republic, are a warm-blooded oxygen-breathing species, originating from a protein-lipid biochemistry with nucleic-acid based genetic information storage. In terms of standard interspecies morphology, they are upright bipedal lacertians, possessing a squamous integument in shades of
Immortality Hurts: No, it really doesn’t. For the most part, it was engineered, and the people who wrote the design specs thought about these issues. And included bug-out and even opt-out switches. And no-one makes you inload the final memories of the version of you that got itself killed,
Immortality Bisexuality: Might look that way (well, not for the galari, who have no concept of sex, or sex, or gender), but it’s actually the result of desire control, etc., as listed under Bi The Way and Everyone Is Bi. The rest of the immortals weren’t inclined this
Immortality Begins At Twenty: Played mostly straight with the eldrae and eldrae-designed immortagens. Well, late twenties, dignified early thirties, anyway, and it doesn’t take all that much longer after that before the combination of bodily reflections of the experience of age and biological youth to make it very, very
For sundry reasons which are assuredly of no interest to you, gentle readers, I have been granted an abundance of writing time, something which for the past year and a half I have been eking out in dribs and drabs here and there. So, this weekend notwithstanding, you should hopefully
The Immodest Orgasm: While this is unlikely to ever appear on screen… well, despite not being quite the hedonists the Culture are – having a few other things to do other than amuse the Minds – they do have access to high levels of biotechnology, and believe in excellence in all things.