“Drop shuttle (n.): An armored crate flown by a maniac.” – The Unofficial Guide To The IN Flying a drop shuttle is a unique sort of piloting. You’re always deploying under combat conditions, and often before you’ve established orbital superiority, so people are shooting at you from the moment
Democracy Is Bad: This is the Imperial consensus view. Partly for the fairly obvious reason that in democracies like ours, where just about everything or everything minus a small list is up for grabs by vote, it’s just a tyranny with more tyrants. (See, thus, the Drowning of the
One week earlier, somewhere in the Gal-kiderax System, Theomachy of Galia. “I’d kill a soph in a fair fight.” The black-cloaked figure paced in circles, long stride carrying him from wall to wall. “Hells, even before I left my dear stuffy cousins behind, I’d kill a soph in
Defictionalization: My terrific taste for metafiction aside, this also happens in-world, quite a bit. Most notable, perhaps, is the incident (see: Stranger Than Fiction) in which the protagonist species from the virtuality game (novel, InVid, watchvid, and slinky) An Ending Not In Fire, the temísi, arthál, and zal!en were
“It is ridiculous, and near-slanderous, to suggest that ‘free trader’ is synonymous with ‘smuggler’! Why, I can guarantee that over fifty percent of voyages made by our members involve no illicit or even borderline-illicit cargoes at all.” “You’re counting the inward legs separately, aren’t you?” “That’s beside
Defcon Five: Three of these systems, actually. The Admiralty has its “strategic condition” levels, in both global and theater senses, ranging from Six (“all is peaceful, quiet, tranquil, and frankly boring”) to One (“full-blown war, or, if this is the global level, galactic armageddon”). Likewise, the Emergency Management Authority has
Deface of the Moon: Monuments are by far the commonest type of this; with small moons, even, sometimes, although far more common are things like carved mountains. (The minor range to the “east” of Calmirie is the classic example, slowly being carved one mountain at a time into likenesses of
Decorative Apostrophe: They’re not decorative. Nor are the other accents. The acute indicates a long vowel; the diaeresis indicates, as it does in other languages, that two vowels are pronounced separately, and an apostrophe, found trailing a vowel with a diaeresis, indicates that that vowel is both long and
Decade Dissonance: Played fully straight. The gaps in the Associated Worlds are full of backward “Forgotten Worlds” and “Unemerged”, who either are undeveloped enough to not have anything anyone wants, or who managed – after reaching non-worldbound status – to squander whatever cultural capital they had without bootstrapping themselves to meaningful star
Well, I was going to write something about the nature of evil and all that for today, seeing as this is post number 666, but honestly, I couldn’t think of anything suitable. Which may or may not have something to do with my plague of the day, which I
“Five scientist-explorers were exploring an abandoned outpost in the Expansion Regions one day when they came across a freshly-excavated artifact, still humming with power and covered in unknown controls. “The first, a galari, said ‘We should transport this back to our laboratory, so that we can investigate it properly, and
Death World: In one very real sense, most of them, since most worlds that aren’t your own come complete with an atmohydrosphere that you can’t breathe, a temperature that will probably kill you, and quite possibly a very unhelpful gravity, to boot. Many of the Apocalypse How worlds