Alternative Calendar: Several. There’s the regular Harmonious Calendar, which is based on Eliera’s – as the homeworld and the throneworld – cycles, but also serves as the de jure calendar for the purposes of the financial year, official record-keeping, and suchlike. In turn, it’s based on weavetime, which is
Sealed Evil in a Can: Probably more than a few of them, buried in ancient ruins and archives. A few are physical artifacts, but most are information – recipes either for software or for assemblers. And rather inconveniently, they’re mixed in with not-much-really in a can, incomprehension in a can,
Gone Horribly Right: An unfortunately large number of experiments with recursively self-improving seed AI are probably the most significant examples, here, for which see that half of the entry under AI Is A Crapshoot. And for the consequences – well, there are quite the wide variety there, but for a good
Living Forever Is Awesome: This is, essentially, the default position of the immortalists, which include all of the natural immortals. There are so many places to go, people to see, things to learn, things to do, it’s impossible to become truly bored… and, oh, yes, do see also Eternal
(Here, have a vaguely Christmas drabble.) On ancient Eliera, they roast meat in the snow and light fires for the return of the second sun. At the peak of Kythera’s deep winter, they dine in the Deep Vaults while robots above set the atmosphere on fire. In drift-habitats across
All Planets Are Earthlike: So very averted. Actually, I think somewhat-terraformed Mars-like worlds are in a slight statistical majority among the Empire’s inhabited planets, but there’s plenty of other non-gas-giant like inhabited worlds as well, and that’s certainly not counting all the non-technically-inhabited ones. (And even the
Have there been any existing cases or situations (dear lazyweb), of branding or trademark issues where the names of nations or cities are concerned? (Apart from all the obvious ones we ignore, that is.) I was thinking of this recently with regard to all those cities, and planets, of course,
Eternal Love: Played straight – with the proviso that being an entire society of natural immortals, they understand exactly how hard it is to make a relationship work over the longest term, and so invest in cultural features designed to help with that, including marrying late, long and intimate engagements, a
All Nations Are Superpowers: Averted. The Associated Worlds contain a crapload of tiny single-system or couple-of-systems powers. They may not add up to much in terms of galactopolitical significance, but they’re certainly there.
Little Green Man in a Can: Rarely done for the sake of secrecy and wonderment, but quite common among those species which are uncomfortable (or, well, dead) in the modal atmosphere and gravity of the Associated Worlds, and which aren’t comfortable for whatever reason with the notion of pantropic
The Alliance: The Conclave of Galactic Polities. Which sounds like it runs the Galaxy, actually in theory runs the relatively small chunk of the Galaxy called the Associated Worlds, and in actual practice does so slightly less well than the United Nations runs Earth. But it is spectacularly less pretentious
Literal Surveillance Bug: It’s amazing what biotech can do to literalize metaphors. Who needs robotic spy bugs when you can have actual spy bugs? They’re a common tool in the espionage toolbox of just about everyone who can manage it.