Alistair Young

Trope-a-Day: Hostage Situation

Hostage Situation: You’re going to take the habitually armed people who can’t be killed hostage?  And this was your good plan?

Trope-a-Day: Horse of a Different Color

Horse of a Different Color: The cerrúr is a four-horned, hexapedal, browsing animal, but it fills much the same niche as the horse, as historically early basic transportation/power and later prestige transportation. Despite much wishful thinking and a few attempts, no-one ever managed to breed a bandal large enough

Trope-a-Day: Horde of Alien Locusts

Horde of Alien Locusts: Much more common (although still by no means common) in the form of out-of-control von Neumann replicators (“hegemonizing swarms”) than as lifeforms.  Fortunately, most things this single-minded are not terribly efficient, innovative, or adaptable – intellectual monocultures rarely are – so they rarely become a serious problem, or

More Transparency

And another thing… …influencing all this, which I meant to mention in the last post, is more of a species-nature issue. Humans have a hard-wired norm-seeking instinct. Our monkey-brains are hardwired to generate error signals when they perceive that we are being disagreed with by other human-shaped objects. It is

Transparency

A question that came up in a G+ discussion sprung from this post: Both the military and business have a legitimate need for secrecy/non-transparency — does the eldraeic equivalent really operate with complete transparency? There so, they would say, speaks the voice of statism and paranoia – probably with one of

Trope-a-Day: Hopeless War

Hopeless War: Averted, for the most part.  With regard to one kind of hopeless war, well, the Navy and Legions are just that good at the general category of activities listed under “killing people and breaking things”, and so have usually been able to bring things to a successful conclusion

Trope-a-Day: Honest Adviser

Honest Adviser: The non-sophont AIs built to advise various runér, Senators, etc., are programmed to be this. And provably so! With code reviews! You can do this with sophonts, too, digital or biological, these days – given the ability of geas nanotech, alethiometers, and the ability to muck about with the

Trope-a-Day: Holy City

Holy City: For the Empire, Ellenith, the holy city which serves as the center for the Church of the Flame, being built around the Dome of Unity, the 6th of the temples along the Shining Path, the seeress Merriéle‘s path to her conversation with the gods atop the mountain

Shoot First, Stab Later

“As you have been told, it is not Legion policy to require you to carry swords in anything but dress uniform, nor is it Legion policy to use them in combat.” “As you will soon find out, many creative souls before you have decided to use them anyway as personal

Trope-a-Day: Holographic Terminal

Holographic Terminal: Or Trigraphic Terminal, rather. As mentioned immediately above, used just about everywhere for their dynamically-reconfigurableness.  They were less ubiquitous in the old days, when the need to wear a pair of haptic gloves with accelerometers, gyroscopes, and force-feedback made them at least a little inconvenient, but in these

The Emperors' Sword: Light Infantry

Making up nine of every sixteen legions – even when we don’t count the various specialized legions which are mostly built off a light infantry platform – the light infantry are the backbone of the Imperial Legions. Which, in another sense, means they get all the dirty jobs that no-one more

Trope-a-Day: Hologram

Hologram: This future does have these (and uses them an awful lot for user interfaces, it must be said, since dynamically reconfigurable interfaces are (a) shiny, and (b) easy to implement this way); however, as the trope points out, there are properly not “holograms”, but really “volumetric displays”, even though