It is now, at last, time for the cover art for The Core War and Other Stories to be revealed (click through to see full-size version): Beautiful, isn’t it? Now, click through here for more on the artist’s site. Art credits: Drake-class frigate illustrated by William Black more
No Gravity For You: Subverted, since the knowledge of how to move in microgravity is commonplace, and microgravity-friendly martial arts are almost as commonplace. And, indeed, a majority of spacer habitats and starships run without gravity anyway. Not like they’re a bunch of dirthuggers, y’know? (And if you
No, that’s not going to be today’s letter “F” piece. Well, probably not. But it does mean that the proofs are proofed, the cover is made, the prices are priced, the checks are checked, all systems are go, all lights are green, and as soon as I double-check
Sniffer Packet hung invisibly in place, far above the ecliptic of this nameless Ember-class star, whose sole distinction was its position nearly 800 light-orbits from Chanq (Vanlir Edge). The starwisp was a speck in a soap bubble; trailing behind it, the flimsy, filamentary acres of its light sail now re-rigged
No Conservation of Energy: Averted, dammit, despite the best efforts of generations of mad scientists to rip physics a new one on this point. (That, and the rest of the laws of thermodynamics. Well, mostly those, as the Empire has a lot of people running around who take the second,
Just a quick snippet today, as I’ve been composing stuff for use elsewhere: “absolutely sure”: A rare example of the double-positive negative grammatical form in the wild. “Absolutely sure”, in technarch jargon, means “educated conjecture”, or indeed “wild-assed guess”. See also: “reasonably sure”, qualified certainty, dubifier, Rationalist-Empiricist Pissing Contest.
No Blood For Phlebotinium: Generally averted, since by the time a species makes it into space it has generally noticed that the universe is full of giant piles of natural resources, most of which don’t belong to anyone, and most of the really interesting kinds of phlebotinium are synthetic
[redacted] Secure Storage SWG, Fifth Directorate, Imperial State Security Tertiary Monitoring Node “Alert flag just came up: storage node 4-23-3317, outside penetration, profiled as hostile. Dispatching response team.” “Belay that. Class 23, confirm?” “Yes…” “Then monitor the situation for an hour, and if the flag’s cleared down, send maintenance
No Biochemical Barriers: Averted, mostly. While there will be absolutely no Half Human Hybrids, or indeed Half Anything Hybrids running around, as I said back then, it can get a mite fuzzy: Alien Food is Edible: Well, no, for the most part it isn’t, given differing biochemistries, chiralities, etc.
Hanith Desúmé, Dinéval Eugenesis Pty., to Laurë Minaxianos and Ryal Cerron-ith-Oléron, greetings. Permit me first to apologize for the delay in proceedings; since both the chloromorph dryad clade and the alaereldrae aquanaut clade represent extensive whole-body modifications, we thought it best to take particular care in stripping clade-template alterations from
Nice to the Waiter: Played very straight, given the Empire’s less antagonistic/separatist class structure and its labor demographics. Also, y’know, heavily emphasized sense of gentlesophly behavior.
“We don’t speak to our gods, and they don’t speak to us.” “Why? The last time we asked them for something and they heard us, Venirek Sky-Hammer punched our world so hard that everything died. And it’s not that we’re not grateful, but that’s the