In today’s random postage, something I just wrote on the worldbuilding mailing list, in response to the following: Do your worlds have a Peace town [city of refuge], where people can go in order to avoid the law? Not as such, or at least not officially. (Certainly people, like,
Firing One Handed: Works much better with the small examples of personal arms, pistols and such, whose vector-control recoil compensation is very good indeed at making it manageable, and come with an aiming system that plugs directly into your personal-area network, which is to say, brain. Nevertheless, averted for heavy
Filk Song: See Future Music – in-world, this is a major genre. Personally, I’d love to have some actual filk set in the Eldraeverse too, but since I have yet to attract a filker, or, in fairness, write enough so to do… (And in any case, I need to attract
Future Music: While the Empire has been around for a very, very long time and as such has accumulated far more musical genres that I can reasonably describe, here are some notable ones – with staying power – in Imperial space: Digital: This isn’t a parallel to our electronic music; it’
Fictional Political Party: Actually, a remarkable number of them – which has a lot to do, I suppose, with the cyberdemocratic/sortitive (random selection) nature of the Imperial Senate and most local assemblies making running a conventional political party a giant exercise in futility; they function mostly as debating societies, influence
Fictional Currency: First, see Global Currency for the most widespread of these: the Imperial esteyn, the Accord exval, the Rim Free Zone’s ergcred, the universal-if-useless gAu, gAg and gPt, the information-currency finality, and so forth. Then there are the Empire’s internal currency (for all practical purposes, sets of
Global Currency: Played straight, twice, and arguably more often. The first of them is the Empire’s esteyn, acceptable everywhere in it and existing in the interests of internal free trade. It’s a quasi-fiat currency, managed by the Imperial Board of Money and Values to avoid either inflationary or
Feudal Future: Subverted. While the runér who make up the “executive branch” of the Empire’s government might look like a feudal hierarchy from some angles, and their titles are occasionally translated that way, in practice they have much less power than a feudal lord’s theoretical powers, and theirs
The Federation: Well, that would be the Voniensa Republic, an essentially conscious Expy of Star Trek‘s Federation. Unfortunately, the Voniensans have to contend with the lack of the scriptwriters on their side; thus, their baseline-fetishism and naturalistic-fallacy-ridden philosophy (“our insert-species-here-anity”), heavy restrictions on personal augmentation (including ephemeralism, because, y’
So. I am, as you know (Bob), a big user of Translation Convention, both within and without universe. (Within, in the sense that when it comes time for the linguists of the Imperial Exploratory Service to build a new translation database when they’re about to contact someone new, they
Fate Worse Than Death: Played essentially straight, rape and torture-wise, given cultural attitudes to slaving and All Things Connected With It. This, of course, became even more the case when death became really hard to inflict (see Final Death); the brain-mounted suicide-switch, often with emergency bug-out transmitter, and a restore
Fast Tunneling: Those hypothetical subterrenes mentioned in the Real Life section of the trope? Yeah. They have those. All those radioactives and, later, fusion reactors means you can afford that kind of energy budget.