The Neutral Zone: Played straight, although given the nature of the stargate plexus as, essentially, a mesh network, it’s not so much a zone, but a list of Neutral Nexi. No-one tries to enforce deep space as a neutral zone, mostly because it’s just too damn big and
Second-pass editing: complete! Now just the final pages to insert into the formatted file, and then it’s down to me to build covers and e-book versions and ship off to jolly old Amazon. (Current proto-book-file-page-count: 325.)
Neuro Vault: Played straight. Only the old-time classical version, though, where you hide it in people’s memories using good old-fashioned memory palace techniques, or closely related gnostic overlays emulating them. The trouble with imprinting stuff on bits of the brain that aren’t the usual memory regions is that
(I’ve got the allergies today, so am reworking some of my notes and doing light editing. But here, have this wee snippet I ran across in the process:) “Sure, you could theoretically weaponize a nucleonic device, but what would be the point? Everyone knows they’d have no imaginable
“I once asked a Drake captain if he was worried about hostile boardings when on the ground. You know, because none of the main guns can range on the area in front of the landing bay doors, and it doesn’t have a security turret? So he handed me some
Proto-book-file-size: 301 pages. Editor: Tired. Other editor: sick as a sicker than the dogs. Work: ongoing anyway.
Nerds Are Sexy: In the Empire, almost universally so. It’s an emergent consequence, and an entirely predictable one, of certain other cultural characteristics: see, for example, For Science, Serious Business, and Wrench Wench. Also, thereby, self-perpetuating. Fic-wise and other-reason-wise, see also Nice Labcoat.
Proto-book-file-size: 251 pages. Longer story: all included. Everything referenced elsewhere: also all included. Requisite reprint permission: applied for. Cover art: In progress. Also, damn, guys, from these draft renders, it’s going to be awesome. …maybe another 180 pages or so awaiting final formatting, at this point. Woo!
Yes, just like this. (Image from Serenity: Those Left Behind) Wrench Wench: Oh, my, there are a lot of these. There are, of course, perfectly valid in-world reasons for this (population demographics and their effect on employment patterns; never having acquired human cultures’ weird attitudes about men’s and women’
Naughty Tentacles (since removed from TV Tropes, but I think we all know what this one is about, yes?): Given that there are species with tentacles, and Boldly Coming is in effect, this does happen (consensually). However, no-one out there would understand why humans in general and the Japanese in
Current proto-book-file page count: 175. That includes, now, the whole of the Core War (the edited epistolary experiment) and everything it depends on; so now, on to the next stage, the smaller task of polishing for formal publication all the pieces that have been quoted from elsewhere. (And then the
National Weapon: There are really too many local variants on this theme to play it straight in the modern era; about the closest you can come are the Two Swords of the Old Empires (see Choice of Two Weapons), which the initial spread of the Empire on its own world