A God Am I: Averted, mostly. The Transcend (and its eikone archai) are perfectly aware (and will point out to the confused) that they aren’t omnipotent – that’s what the “weakly” in weakly godlike superintelligence means – merely extraordinarily powerful, intelligent, and possessed of limited prolepsis via clionomic calculation and
No Such Thing As Wizard Jesus: Its aversion and playing straight would both be played out in the event of any first contact with Earth, around the first time someone tried to convert one of the offworlders, ’cause, y’know, water into wine? Nanobots do it all the time. Magical
Global Warming: Yes, it happens. The usual result, at least in the civilized worlds, is massive technofixes, from the brute force (say, giant orbiting sunshades with solar panels on the back) to the subtle and ecological; usually coupled with an extensive program to move industries off-world, into orbit at the
Giant Flyer: None of the major worlds documented thus far have truly Giant Flyers; some of the ones with lower gravity have some pretty large flyers, but gravity-scaling doesn’t make them terribly strong, rideable, or dangerous. Well, perhaps I should say terrestrial worlds. A few life-bearing gas giants (and,
Giant Enemy Crabs: The tennoa are merely crablike – radially symmetrical, for a start – and breathe chlorine, but since their obligate utilitarianism puts them at odds with the rest of the Worlds at predictably regular intervals, well, they can play this one pretty straight sometimes even so. Most of the crab-bots
Ghost Planet: Quite a few of them, in various locations – the Galaxy is veritably knee-deep in elder-race litter; as mentioned elsewhere, this gives the existential-threat people something to worry about, and also enables companies like Probable Technologies, ICC to make an entire industry out of archaeology. (Since I oopsed and
Ghost In The Machine: Averted. Souls are software objects; there are no supernatural qualities whatsoever to sophont life, and even if you can pull out the software, recompile it, and stick it in another body, the only thing that’s being transferred is data. It would always be possible to
Gentlesoph Snarker: Pairing nicely with Stiff Upper Lip, and more awkwardly blending with Sophisticated as Hell, it’s practically obligatory for the Imperial gentlesophs of quality, much to the discomfort of everyone else.
Genre Savvy: This is what the science of memetics (applied) will do for you. (And as has occurred to me more than a few times since starting this project, TV Tropes itself is a pretty good example of memetic research in action.) Since people do, by and large, do a
Genocide Dilemma: The remarkably cynical view of the Conclave of Galactic Polities on this particular issue is that, yes, genocide is wrong and very, very illegal. On the other hand, some species, polities, religions, or other groups are just so determinedly xenocidal that so long as they exist, they’re
Genie in the Machine: The classic example here is the classic cornucopia machine (available in all good Imperial appliance stores or catalogs!) with its friendly, helpful artificial intelligence to help you find the right tools for what you want to do, and then build them for you… …despite the essential
Genetic Memory: Exists naturally in a few places, of course. That terrestrial biology, et. al., happens to use different storage mechanisms for genetic and memetic information is purely a local quirk, not a law of nature. But better known is that those wacky bioengineers, the esseli (remember them?) have invented