Cultural Crossovers: Iron Man

Posted by Associated Worlds

So here’s a question I was asked recently:

In the vein of questions about media, let’s throw at the Eldrae the 70mm IMAX versions of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (note, entirely cinematic, nothing from TV) with enough cultural footnotes to understand the context. Assuming all movies are available up to the end of Phase Three, what would the Eldrae opinions be on each of the movies and if they wouldn’t work in the Eldrae market, what sort of revisions/alterations would make them work?

…this may take some time to answer as a whole, ’cause I’m going to have to rewatch the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to really give it a fair shot, so I guess I’m turning it into a post series. You see the terrible, terrible burdens I’m prepared to undertake for you, gentle readers?

Anyway. Starting with the first – well, with Iron Man, we have a really easy one to do, because there’s very little you would have to do to make this fit perfectly into their extremely popular “Awesome People Being Awesome” genre.

The only things you might want to tweak a little would involve cover minor cultural fluency issues, like explaining to the audience why people disapprove of the size of Tony Stark’s ego, rather than that being somewhere between normal and appropriate; explaining some banter in terms compatible with the local sense of humor; and explaining why anyone might want to cover up the existence/identity/activities of Iron Man in the first place. But those are relatively small deals and optional tweaks: the fundamentals of the movie would work perfectly in the Imperial market.

Trope-a-Day: The Future Will Be Better

Posted by Associated Worlds

The Future Will Be Better: Well, obviously. We’re working to improve the present all the time, and we’re fundamentally awesome, so there’s basically no way the future can’t be better. Why would you even ask that question?

(In Earth-relative terms, the Imperial cultural climate successfully blends 1920s-1930s Gernsbackian utopian futurism and 1950s cultural self-confidence into a heady and unshakeable brew powering the Golden Age That Never Ends. Make Way For Tomorrow, Today —

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHOzPuKEnJY]

— hold the irony, and banish the cynicism to somewhere beyond the outer rim colonies, m’kay?)

Trope-a-Day: Future Imperfect

Posted by Associated Worlds

Future Imperfect: Generally averted, due to the historical greater continuity of civilization (“It has been 7,921 years since the last interregnum.”), general better record-keeping (thanks to the Repository of All Knowledge, et. al., and a religious climate that favors the burning of book-burners, and so forth), and, of course, people who live a long, long time and don’t forget much.

X-anity

Posted by Associated Worlds

(Alternate words: none. Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m assuming you submitted it in the spirit of my single usage of it in this trope-a-day back in 2014, rather than as the more-commonly-seen abbreviation of “Christianity”, because it’s not like there is any of the latter *there* to write about.)

“What is X-anity, you ask?

“(Apart, that is, from a rather ugly portmanteau in Eldraeic that I strongly suspect will not be improved by translation into any of the other languages of the Accord.)

“It’s a general term referring to a different quality for each species: kar mkaeth for the kaeth, lishólen for the ciseflish, ësseldrae for my own species, except that we use that term to refer to an ideal, not a current state, and so forth. As for what those mean, well, it’s six things, and therefore none at all.

“First, and most usefully, in biological terms, it would mean the psychological characteristics that members of that species have in common. So for us that would be things like mélith as a sense and instinct, or for the kaeth, trasered vandthel, or for the dar-e’sevdra, estrus, or for the tennoa, utilitarianism, and so forth. That each species has its own unique essence in this way is undeniable; promoting these unique points of view is much of the motivation behind uplift, for example.

“That being said, most academicians and professionals who might need to reference it go out of their way to find some other term, because secondly, it’s an example of the applied naturalistic fallacy, in which people declare such psychological characteristics terminal rather than instrumental values and insist that they cannot possibly be modified lest they change the X-ane experience and thus destroy X-anity from within. Something that has been invoked to justify the retention of everything from hyperbolic discounting through envy and xenophobia to morbidity and mortality –

(Many loud interruptions from audience.)

“The bioconservatives are out in force tonight, I see.

“Thirdly, in an extension to the first definition, people have used it to define a larger number of common characteristics, which are typically cultural norms – meaning modal averages – for a given species, by reference claiming them as innate to some degree or another. Apart from the inaccuracy of this – any functioning sophont brain is necessarily remarkably plastic, as manifested by the high levels of cultural interchange in polyspecific societies –

(Heckler makes reference to interspecies mating.)

“That wasn’t actually the kind of ‘cultural interchange’ I had in mind, but it does make a good example. As it happens, the Empire does have a high xenophilia rate, as do most polyspecific societies, although I am rather pleased to be able to say that ours is one of the highest. Which is exactly what you would expect, since the way that instincts manifest is shaped by cultural imprinting in all sophonts and even many prosophonts, including what and who they find attractive.

“And biological cultural determinism, therefore, is so much arrant balderdash, despite which evidence, fourthly, this definition is so often misused by authoritarian culture-groups, either as a means to deny another culture-group membership in X-anity, at which point they no longer merit consideration as fellow sophonts, or to equate their culture or their preferences with the optimally X-ane, and use X-anity as a hammer to enforce cultural conformity.

“These multiple definitions, in any case, render X-anity as a concept both controversial,. fifthly, in any context in which it might be even slightly ambiguous, and sixthly, therefore useless in any serious debate.”

– Academician Vallis Archíël, sophontologist,
student’s transcript from a guest speaker session, Academy of Loryet

Mind Plagues

Posted by Associated Worlds

cultural contamination (n.): The passage of memes and their sociotypes between cultures, often with associated unrest, due to contact between them.

Attitudes to cultural contamination vary widely across known space. The extreme poles of this are the Voniensa Republic, whose policy is to avoid cultural contamination to the greatest extent possible, to avoid “interfering with the natural development of indigenous cultures”; and the Empire, which considers that any worthwhile, mature culture ought to be robust enough to cope with a few foreign ideas. (And, indeed, where “primitives” and “barbarians” are concerned, often goes out of its way to cause as much cultural contamination as it possibly can.)

It is a truism of memetics that cultural contamination is always bilateral; it is fundamentally impossible to avoid two-way communication of ideas in the course of social contact, and as such each culture involved in contact will always be contaminated by each other culture. Attitudes to this also vary widely, in this case along tripolar lines. These poles are represented by again, the Empire, which not only considers its own culture robust enough to handle foreign ideas, but actively mines cultures it meets for any good ideas it might not have had itself yet; the Theomachy of Galia, whose obsession with theological and ideological purity causes them to avoid foreign ideas at all costs; and the Annik Sodality, which while enjoying foreign ideas from afar, eschews assimilating or any of them lest they offend the imitated or their own sense of disentitlement.

Finally, since this book is one marketed to the cosmopolitan or would-be cosmopolitan Worlds’ traveller, you too, gentle reader, are a vector of cultural contamination.

Try not to let it bother you.

– A Star Traveller’s Dictionary

Trope-a-Day: Third-Person Person

Posted by Associated Worlds

(Note: a planet of the day is still coming, albeit not technically today. Just been movieing.)

Third-Person Person: There are a number of languages and cultures in the Associated Worlds that do this. One notable example is the use of first-third person in Eldraeic, because it lets you cite your attributive name of the moment (see Overly Long Name), and thus reify who you are (or rather, which aspect of yourself you are expressing) right now.

Trope-a-Day: Stay in the Kitchen

Posted by Associated Worlds

(No fic today, sorry… for reasons of pie. Urp.)

Stay in the Kitchen: Averted in the Empire, where Gender Is No Object. No-one there would think of saying it – and when someone from elsewhere says it, they will have the damndest time trying to get the Imperial to understand what the heck they’re driving at.

And they really won’t like what happens if they succeed.

(“…so, you’re telling me that ‘rip him a new one’ is also a metaphor where you come from?”)

Then You Will Meet Your Destiny

Posted by Associated Worlds

So, seeing as we’ve recently considered human cultural artifacts that might prove popular in the Eldraeverse after a hypothetical first-contact-real-soon-now, here’s one for you.

Seriously, it fits perfectly, especially thematically. You’ve got the epicity and idealism, the mythopoetry of things (assuming you read the grimoire cards), the clash of Light and Darkness, technology from Near Future Hard right up to the point of Sufficiently Advanced Techno-Miracles (ontological weapons, even!), Blue and Orange Morality, and the definitive proper attitude towards grimdarkness, namely that it exists to be punched in the face with your space-magic fist of doom. Hell, the Traveler’s even a dead ringer for one of the Transcend’s synapse moons.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZyQK6kUdWQ]

(Seriously awesome ass-kicking to the tune of Immigrant Song also doesn’t hurt.)

…seriously, if Bungie *there* were to port this to full-immersion virtuality and sell it on the Imperial market – half a trillion copies sold, easy. At minimum.

(And, I sidenote, if you were to imagine a variant of the game set at the shiniest heights of humanity’s Golden Age, that would probably be about as close to an Eldraeverse video game as there could ever be.)

Cultural Transfers

Posted by Associated Worlds

In the jolly question box recently, I received this:

If tomorrow morning the Eldrae were to make contact with Earth, what cultural item (besides a good Popsicle) would be the most taken with aplomb and glee and why?

After due consideration and extensive contemplation, I find I can only answer thus:

I haven’t a bloody clue.

(Which is partly because, y’know, comparing a set of trillions to a set of millions is intrinsically hard, but also because my grasp on Earth culture is kind of weird and idiosyncratic. So. Or maybe my brain just doesn’t feel like working on that this month, although it could probably name a few very specific items. Enh.)

So on the way answerward, I’m going to throw this one open to you, gentle readers. After all, you’ve been reading along for some time now, and probably have a few ideas on this front yourselves. Send ’em in, and I’ll see what my representative cast of characters has to say about ’em…

Trope-a-Day: No Such Thing As Alien Pop Culture

Posted by Associated Worlds

No Such Thing As Alien Pop Culture: Averted, for the most part – even without the dodge, I suppose, of pointing out that the Imperials would consider our distinction between high culture and low culture the product of a certain type of class-based social structure that humans have, and sniff rather loudly at the parochialism that assumes that primate status bigotry (with signifiers everywhere!) is a universal species trait.

I shall instead merely note those things of which the canon has named examples at this point, including music (all the forms listed under Future Music can be considered popular, except the most gratuitously complicated forms of opera and metatonal), an extensive literary culture that includes popular novels (speculative fiction is the Genre That Ate The Mainstream, which in turn becomes the subgenre referred to as “realist fiction”), epic poetry (even in the modern day), graphic novels, watchvids (i.e., non-interactive movies and television), InVids, slinkies, virtual-reality games, virtual-reality cosmoi, alternate-reality games, regular computer games, RPGs, board games, mechanical toys, recreational dueling and non-combat challenges, haut cuisine, participatory (although much less so spectator) sports and, yes, even spam.

Trope-a-Day: My Species Doth Protest Too Much

Posted by Associated Worlds

My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Seemingly averted because, so far as you can tell, all the Imperials really are that way. (The explanation they would give, stripped of technical and polite terminology both, boils down to “We’re just obsessively inclined to believe that we are certain things, and even more obsessively inclined to live up to our monumental self-image in those regards,” which while probably true so far as it goes, is not really a full explanation.)

A more, ah, complete explanation is that in really fundamental things, like the Imperial libertist ethical tradition, those who don’t feel like conforming leave-or-are-left with great speed in the name of self-preservation (the Renunciates and future Renegades), and that those people who disagree firmly enough with the relentless drumbeat of internal and external perfection, Science!, beauty and negentropism that makes up the social consensus, while absolutely free to go their own way while remaining there, still generally find the atmosphere intolerable enough as to find their own way out.

In short: the Imperials stay that way by kicking out all the troublemakers.

Trope-a-Day: Multicultural Alien Planet

Posted by Associated Worlds

Multicultural Alien Planet: Well, I try. In practice, it varies by species, depending on how much time I’ve spent detailing them in particular, but they’re all intended to be this way, outside the odd Hive Mind, or other special cases like the Equality Concord.

As another note, this is mostly true of homeworlds, and true of colonies to a much lesser extent. While homeworlds have usually had plenty of time to evolve regional cultural differences in the absence of high-speed communications, later colonies have generally had those homogenizing their cultures from day one. Between colony worlds, though, you can find the same sort of cultural delta.

More Questions, More Answers

Posted by Associated Worlds

And more questions arrive:

Here is an interesting what if for you. If you could live in the Eldraeverse would you want to?

They had me at immortality.

Or at post-scarcity.

Or at vastening.

Or at forking.

Or at the Repository of All Knowledge.

Or at, y’know, space.

Or at a refreshing absence of self-appointed gibbering loons under the impression they’re entitled to tell everyone else what to do, or else…

So, um, yeah, pretty much.

What parts of Eldrae culture make you personally uncomfortable?

I may be a bad target for this question.

Partly because I’m an SF-reading, SF-writing, transhumanist anarchist. On the Yudkowsky table, my future shock level is somewhere between 3.5 and 4. And while, being human, I have the innate wisdom of squick, I’ve told it to shut up so much due to, well, items one through four above, that these days it barely twinges.

I’m sure there are some things, that I can’t think of off the top of my head – and, yes, that means I do find nothing wrong with that, and I have no problems with that either, have fun going through the index – going on in Imperial space that would make me uncomfortable, permissive society that it is, but for the most part the things that do so – many of which exist elsewhere in the Worlds as a whole – are those things that violate the principles of Consent and Obligation. Which are *there* frowned upon very strongly indeed.

What do you think the hardest cultural difference for you or humans in general to accept would be?

…all of it, in gestalt.

Well, take a look at Blue and Orange Morality and Values Dissonance; and then note that we probably suffer from it worse than most exotic species, because as fellow hominins, we’re close enough to fall into the Uncanny Valley rather than being alien enough to be expected to behave in an alien manner.

And an unfortunate number of instincts we have are just plain wrong by their standards: we don’t respect other people’s lives or their property and especially not their choices, are xenophobic, unempathic, incurious, emotionally labile to the point of hysteria, situationally ethical, obsessed with relative tribal status, and deeply in love with ugliness.

No-one likes to be seen as an inferior species. Especially if they’ve actually studied Earth culture at a shallow level, and come away with the notion that a large proportion of us are the kind of inferior species which, if invited to dinner, is likely to insult their host, take a shit on the table in the middle of the fish course, sexually assault someone over dessert, and steal the candlesticks on the way out, and not doing so is considered coming out ahead of the norm. (Side note: it really doesn’t help that our media does such an excellent job of portraying us as a Planet of Complete Assholes.)

All of which is to say, well, to get along *there* we’d have to completely repress and deny even the slightest, most sublimated trace of envy or enyious-sounding ideas and even a hint of the “there oughta be a law” instinct, cultivate self-control and rationality enough to suit the talcoríëf-esteeming locals (preferably while not losing the capacity for deep passion and childlike delight in things, losing which is also part of their hypothetical critique), find a way to desire neither to lead nor to follow nor to care what the Jones’ are doing, and develop adequately large sticks up our asses about politesse, respect for other people’s stuff, and the principle of the thing – while not showing any weakness on these points, because we will be judged constantly, and especially on what we are in the dark.

Being human and therefore possessed of unavoidably human mentality, it’s hard enough to get my mind into this framework properly enough to write them, never mind trying to live it 24/7. Fortunately, *there*, they have cures for that.

(Note: This may seem harsh, but a thing to remember is that we’re the ones who come with brains hard-coded to relative status hierarchies, and in this scenario. we’d be judging ourselves against people who’ve been engaging in a relentless program of no-holds-barred self-improvement for centuries.)

Do the Eldrae favor punishment, rehabilitation, or something else as a means of combating crime?

Imperial judicial penalties (as handled by the Office of Reconstruction and Execution by the Curial courts, once they’re done), draw from two paradigms: mélith – balance and obligation – and medicine.

So there’s no punishment, per se. By either philosophy, engaging in that is absolutely pointless.

What there is is restitution and cure. The former takes the form of fines: either directly restitutive where economic crimes are concerned, according to the Fivefold Rule (repaying the victim fivefold), or in the form of weregeld. Also, in either case, the criminal is responsible for paying all costs incurred due to his crime, including police costs, court costs, loss-of-income-and-time for the victim and any and all witnesses, etc., that lost time due to the case, and so forth. All debts must be paid, says Saravoné’s Code, and they mean every word of it. (And if you don’t have the assets, they’ll still get it out of you one way or another.)

The latter takes the form of memetic rehabilitation and reconditioning, for virtually all non-violent crimes and minor crimes of violence. Despite the name, this has little to do with rehabilitation in the Western penological sense when, to one extent or another, prisoners are supposed to rehabilitate themselves; meme rehab & recon means being handed over to the psychedesigners, the redactors, and if necessary the brain surgeons.

(On the grounds, you see, that people who cannot grasp and duly follow the principles of consent and obligation, or the Fundamental Contract, are self-evidently insane, and need their mental dysfunction repaired like the faulty component that it is. That being said, the Curia has a tremendous respect for the free will and self-integrity of the individual, and as such meme rehab & recon is not compulsory. If you genuinely prefer dying as yourself to living as your repaired self, you may opt for euthanasia at any time.)

More serious violent crimes (the ones which literally can’t make restitution for their crime because the bill is too high to pay with anything other than their entirety) and cases of incurable dysfunction with or without recidivism are handed directly over to the executioners or euthanatrists, respectively. The intent behind this death penalty, however, is neither punishment nor deterrence (after all, it’s not the severity but the certainty that counts); it’s surgery – cutting out society’s sick parts as surgeons once removed incurable tumors.

(Note: You can put that down under things humans would find culturally difficult to accept, too, inasmuch as the average human, citizens of Western democracies especially, is not likely to be comfortable with a legal system that has but two penalties, brainwashing or death. (But, hey, if you don’t like brainwashing, you can always choose death, right?))

Trope-a-Day: Klingons Love Shakespeare

Posted by Associated Worlds

Klingons Love Shakespeare: While cultures also are very different (see: Culture Clash), there’s enough commonality among near-median species that this sort of thing happens all the time, between any pair of species you might care to name. Even if it’s only about one small, weirdly idiosyncratic cultural element – given the way these things go, Earth is as likely to become famous for popsicles – a nice hat to the first one to spot the reference without going to the TV Tropes page – as for, say, Confucianism or the eponymous Shakespeare.

(As a side note: this is the very last one of the repeat trope-a-days mentioned here, although I gave up on (R)-ing the titles long ago. So, all fresh content from now on! Not that I imagine most of y’all could tell which were which, heh, given the obscurity of previous blog.)

Food & Humor

Posted by Associated Worlds

It’s question-answering time here at the Eldraeverse! A reader writes:

Two questions-

1) Is there a food item for the Eldrae that has assumed the same memetic status as bacon for humans?

2) What do the Eldrae find funny? What human comedians, if they were to go on tour in Eldrae territory, would do well and which ones would starve?

Thank you!

1. Well, if there is, I don’t know about it yet, and since nothing’s immediately leapt out of my imagination and made me say, “aha, this must be it”, I think I’m going to have to preserve my future authorial maneuvering room on that one, sorry.

On the other hand, there’s at least some reason to suspect there might not be.

Top of that list is mass. We’re one planet of seven billions, and I might be inclined to quibble a little with “for humans”, inasmuch as the bacon meme has spread mostly among the cultural intersection of the Anglosphere and the Internet-connected world, which while a lot of the planet isn’t quite all of it.

This limiting effect is only multiplied when they’re 250-odd star systems plus a scattering of ecumenical colonies, outposts, and exclaves, and those in the core, at least, are rather more heavily populated than ours. Throw in cultural groupings caused by light-lag, differences in diet across different worlds, and that common culture is both (a) polyspecific, including species that can’t eat the same food period, and (b) more diverse at baseline, due to the lack of the peer-norming instinct humans have, and while memes certainly do catch fire and grow explosively *there* – aided by high-speed Internet-equivalent connections being universal – they have to be ridiculously virulent in order to capture a statistically huge chunk of that population.

I’m sure more local versions of it come and go all the time, though.

2. Argh. Well, that’s not a tricky question for me with respect to *there* , but it is with respect to *here* – namely, I’m not adequately familiar with real-world comedians to even begin to come up with a list.

So here are some general comments on what Imperial-culture humor is like, and then hopefully you can take it from there –

Things that work:

By and large, the majority of their sense of humor is dry. Very dry. Possibly dehydrated.
Irony never fails. Snark is practically impossible to resist.
Likewise, wit and intellectual humor always go down well, and the more levels it works on, the better ¹.
So does surrealism and absurdity. So, to break my rule and name a name, Monty Python would probably play well.
Situational comedy can work, as long as the humor derives from the situation and/or the interaction between the characters, and isn’t specifically targeted at one or all of them.
Black and gallows humor are also generally accepted: in the sorts of situations that lead to them, laughter is, they deem, one of the civilized responses to entropy.

Note: Even if it sounds it to some degree, none of this is necessarily what we would call “high-brow”. On a number of the criteria above, something like, oh, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum would probably work.

Things that don’t work:

Humor that depends on laughing at someone’s pain, misfortune, humiliation, or embarrassment. That’s just perverse. The modal human clearly has something wrong with its empathy-sympathy wiring.
Note: So, to give an example of how this works in practice, you can have something like a traditional romantic comedy because while there is pain and embarrassment, etc., along the way, there’s also a happy ending and you’re notionally looking back with the protagonists narrating the story and laughing with them at the tangled path and difficulties that they overcame to get to said ending. If there wasn’t that payoff at the end, none of it would be funny. (So, there go most of the sitcoms that go for the cheap laughs…)
Also, as a related category, all the humor that depends on the protagonist screwing up repeatedly or just plain being a screw-up. Incompetence isn’t funny. Incompetence (in space, and the spacer-culture attitude on this is pervasive) gets people killed in winnows.
Humor targeted at (in the sense of “laughing at”) individuals or groups. Individuals, for all the reasons above, inasmuch as it’s usually intended to humiliate or embarrass. (And this is a culture which, natively, has essentially no concept of a “friendly insult”.)
And groups because humor that makes fun of the out-group (or, hell, even the in-group) directly or by treating their characteristics as a source of humor depends on the peer-norming instinct that leads humans and other species that have it to see deviations from the majority-norm as somehow wrong. Eldrae don’t have that and they encourage other people not to have that either.
Exception: You can do this when the target is one of the short list of Universally Acknowledged Acceptable Targets: “Ah, Yes, The People” achieved its high box-office despite/because of being a black-toned satire of galactic politicians because politicians and the politically-minded have earned it. In this case, the viciousness of the targeting and the laughing-at-them nature of the beast is entirely intentional because being righteously despised by all decent folks is the mélith the political and politically-minded have earned by being a bunch of scum-sucking slaver-cultist swine in the first place. You’re allowed to take the piss out of the Iltines or the Galians, too, because everyone can righteously hate Space Fascists and brutal theocrats, too, but this is very much not the sort of thing one can aim at mere honorable opponents ²; it’s basically insulting them by refusing to take them seriously. To fall under this exception, you have to be dishonorable, disgusting, and completely outside the pale where civilized society is concerned; people can be wrong without being Bad People, and only Bad People qualify, so it’s a really short list.
Self-deprecation is mostly considered annoying ³.
Shock comedy is an utter fail. In approximate order:
Scatology (and other “gross-out humor”) fails because poop, really? If you’re building recycling systems to cope with your excreta and still find them funny, something’s gone wrong with your cultural evolution somewhere.
I’d say that of sexual humor, but that’s not entirely true. They do have a perfectly good “light-hearted erotica” genre. On the other hand, Eldraeic follows the Culture’s Marain in having a single word per kind of genitalia that suffices for all uses ⁴, so you can’t derive humor from the million euphemisms we insist on using, and the words have basically no shock value. If you go into the food court and yell “penis!”, the strongest reaction you’ll get is along the lines of “What? Where?” The problem with much sexual humor as we define it is that it depends on your society having a giant bug up its ass about sex in the first place, so, yeah, falls rather flat.
Basically, the trouble with transgressive humor ⁵ in a libertist society is that you’ve got some real problems finding taboos to transgress, and when you do, you’re find that you’ve either successfully adopted the posture of the poop-flinging monkey ⁶ or else that of the dude who loves rape and Holocaust jokes, and not only should that shit not be funny, but per reasons mentioned above, basically never is.

1. Dear gods, the puns.

2. If they had elections, using “attack ads” in this style to mock one’s opponent would be a swift ticket to lose the election by way of depriving oneself of decent chaphood. Of course, if they didn’t like your opponent either, you might lose the election to None Of The Above, but there ain’t no way they’d let you win.

3. Pride is a virtue, humility is not.

4. See endnote in the back of which book I don’t remember. Consider Phlebas, maybe?

5. “Transgressive” art forms generally also fail epically. Violating the rules to achieve an interesting effect is interesting. Violating the rules just to shock – here’s a nickel, kid, you’ve learned to create ugliness. Now get your cacophilic ass out of my gallery. Don’t come back.

6. It also tends to be a staple of those who want to use it for, um, political ends, and as a society that prizes coválír – rationalism – that sort of thing gets you a straight out “shut up, moron, the adults in the room are talking”.

Cultural Tells of Language

Posted by Associated Worlds

This came up on the conlang/conculture mailing lists:

Ursula K. LeGuin writes some really gorgeous stub-languages into her fiction. In a lovely short story called “Dancing to Ganam” in her collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, I paused to earmark this:

“Tezyeme,” he said, which meant something on the order of “it is happening the way it is supposed to happen.”

These little philosophical bells in a language always make conlangs more believable and immersive to me – telling the philosophy and culture of a people through the use of language.

What are some examples of words like this in your conlang(s)?

And I thought my answer might just be worth repeating here:

Eldraeic has a few of these. Probably the most notable are the seven or eight words which they use to describe the innate and/or desirable characteristics of their mindset: coválír, estxíjir, mélith, talcoríëf, teir, valëssef, and valxíjir, none of which map precisely onto English/human concepts, even if some of them can get pretty close:

coválír might be translated as propertarianism, but really has the meaning “property as an extension of the self”; mélith, I gloss as “balance and obligation”; talcoríëf is literally “cold-mindedness”, but depending on context, it could reasonably be glossed as “rationality”, “self-mastery”, or “self-knowledge”; teir could be approximately glossed as “honor” or “self-integrity”; valëssef as “divided selfness” or “polymorphic identity” – the multiple social identities one has, and the need to keep them separate both mentally and in dealings with other people,even when you have two different relationships with one person; estxíjir as “wyrd”, “destiny” or “devotion to ideals”; and valxíjir as “uniqueness”, “excellence”, “will to power”, or “forcible impression of self onto the universe”.

(Most of these are covered in rather more detail on one of my trope-a-day pages, here, so I’ll link rather than repeat myself at great length.)

Oh, and estxíjir and valxíjir combine to create qalasír, which one might approximate as “will”, more adequately translate as “driving energies of the individual”, or casually gloss as “a soph’s got to do what a soph’s got to do”. They also give rise to the slang term jír – approx. strength of will, courage, boldness, chutzpah, etc., and to jírileth, liberty – a “life of will/volition-use”.

Which brings me onto another one of those cultural tells: daráv, meaning literally “sophont” – which I gloss as “soph” in informal speech, for the right feel – and used in Eldraeic as the generic word for “person” – without any reference to species, gender, sex, race, etc., etc. unless explicitly added. Also found in compounds like daryteir, “person of honor”, “gentleman” — er, gentlesoph.

Hm, other examples. There’s the term for an Imperial citizen-shareholder, or at least the short term that’s a lot quicker to say than “Imperial citizen-shareholder”; valmiríän, which ambiguously means both “ordered self” and “self who sets in order”, and probably reveals a decent amount about their self-concept in so doing, and its opposite, ulvaledar, “unbound-person”, which means “foreigner” but defines that as “not signatory to the Contract and Charter”.

I’d add the classic series of insults – “Defaulter”, “slaver”, “parasite”, “dullist”, “cacophile”, or “entropic”, but I have not yet translated most of those, except for “dullist”, which is ulsúnadaráv– one who finds lack of the Nine Excellences and their concomitants laudable, or at least non-condemnable; so not technically “one who does not strive to shine”, rather, someone who thinks that there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s zakhrehs (“barbarian”), which while it doesn’t actually say that the thus called are guilty of specific and enumerated acts of coercionism, infiduciarity, theft, mooching, wilful culture-lack, destructionism, disharmony and chaos, implies that they like that sort of thing really hard.

Oh, and if I wax political for a moment, their taxonomy of polities. The principle top-level division of móníë (polities), after all, is that between telelefmóníë (oath-consent states, Societies of Consent – by which they mean anywhere where the social contract is explicit and voluntary) and korasmóníë (force-states, where it isn’t), the latter being in turn primarily divided into talkorasmóníë (autocracies, “true-force states”) and sémódarmóníë (democracies, which charming word means “mutual-slave states”).

I’ve got some fairly telling metaphors, too, but they came up in my English-writing forms and I haven’t translated most of them yet. Except for these different kinds of dilemmas, I think.

And if noodle words count, this.

How to tell if you’re Imperial…

Posted by Associated Worlds

(So, yeah, this is what you get today – not instead of a fic-a-day, because I will catch that up tomorrow – but before the fic-a-day because I’ve been trying to get it finished for three weeks and Never Quite Found The Time. So, today, I sat down and made it my First Priority, belike.

It’s a zompist.com style culture test – see, for example, Mark Rosenfelder’s “How to tell if you’re American”, here. Much like that one, and its cousins for various other cultures and concultures, list those things shared by the vast majority of those cultures, here are some things shared by 90% of the people on the Imperial omnibus-analog, and which would all be contested in various other cultures.

So, without further ado…)

If you live in the Empire…

You are the fortunate citizen of the greatest, most glorious, most wealthy, most civilized, most advanced, most beautiful, and generally most superlative star nation anywhere, the jewel of the entire galaxy, if not beyond, too. Your belief in this is unshakable.
You believe deep down in the Fundamental Contract and the Imperial Charter – guaranteed by you and the rest of your fellow citizen-shareholders, all of whom disapprove very strongly of people who don’t. You may not recall all the contents offhand, but you certainly know the Rights and Responsibilities of the Citizen-Shareholder.
You weren’t born a citizen; you had to explicitly sign the Charter and buy your way in (that latter is why they call you a citizen-shareholder). This, obviously, means that your citizen-shareholdership is worth more than any citizenship you can get “for free”, and more valid than any that isn’t voluntarily assumed.
You know all the verses of all three movements (“How Glorious Our Motherland”, “Make Way for Tomorrow”, and “Hail, Freest of the Free”) of the Imperial anthem, even the ones that aren’t sung any more when Johnny Foreigner might be listening. If you’re a radical, you might have an eensy problem with the more outrageously jingoistic bits, but you sing it anyway.
You expect to see the national flag on every public building – after all, it’s essentially the Empire’s corporate logo, and it’s not like companies, Houses, and other organizations don’t put their logos on everything, now is it?
The image of your country – the more so because of voluntary citizen-shareholdership – is important, and you generally feel that the Empire doesn’t receive the respect you think it deserves. (Since no possible reputation could possibly live up to your monumental self-regard in this respect, this is largely true – and on a good day, you’ll even admit it.)
If you haven’t traveled abroad, you may indulge the conceit that the Associated Worlds are essentially a peripheral extension of the Empire. (Foreign travel generally makes this notion go away with some considerable speed.)
You believe in freedom of speech. (Except for lies on matters of fact, because that’s fraud; and for self-executing code, because that kind of software isn’t speech, as provided for in the Not Having Transsophont Computer Viruses Eat Our Brains Act, or something like that anyway.) But you also believe in freedom of consequences, and if you say something that makes your rep-net score plummet and/or businesses decline to serve you, well, that’s your own damn fault, isn’t it?

Day to day…

It’s quite likely that you live in space – only about two (physically embodied) people in five still live on planet surfaces. Whether or not you do, you’ve certainly been to space, and are familiar with microgravity and proper spacing procedures.
Yes, physically embodied. There are roughly twice as many active infomorphs in the Empire, at any given time, as there are embodied people.
On that note, it’s also probable that you’ve travelled to at least one and probably several other star systems.
You are comfortable with computers, cornucopia machines, nanolathes (hand-worn PDA/universal-tool devices), artificial intelligence, neural laces (implanted computer interfaces), muses (personal aide AIs running on said interfaces), ubiquitous networking, commonplace robotics, living in space, psychedesign (mind editing), forking (making complete or partial copies of yourself, with later remerging), body-switching and uploading into infomorph form, mindcasting, and technological immortality. You consider any place without at least most of these to be primitive, and anyone lacking a similar affinity to be backward.
And you consider anyone who doesn’t desire such an affinity to be appallingly and willfully backward.
The pattern identity theory has been generally accepted for so long that you have a great deal of trouble understanding why anyone would object to, say, uploading, forking, mindcasting, or immortality on those grounds. You are aware that a lot of them do, if only as a datum that doesn’t really make any sense.
While your main interface with the ubiquitous networks around you (the dataweave) is your neural lace, you certainly own a number of terminals as well, from ring to desk sized.
In the Empire, fields such as memetics and psychedesign are mature, along with bioengineering. Thus, your first assumption is that people’s personalities and reactions are chosen, rather than involuntary, and you probably react accordingly.
You have an acute sense of obligation. You would never dream of making even a casual promissory statement that you didn’t intend to follow through on, and certainly never give your word thus.
You probably know a large amount of trivia and customs, maybe even the language, of whatever your ancestral culture – or cultures – was before it was absorbed by the Empire, and practice quite a few of them day-to-day. (Cultural imperialism? That’s where we steal all the good bits from everyone else’s culture and claim they’re ours now, right?)
If you’re a man, you wear boots, trousers, weapon-belt, shirt, sash (carrying pattern, badges and other markers), waistcoat (with pockets), loose folded over-robe in formal dress, and when going out in the weather, cloak with either hood or hat. If you’re a woman, you wear boots, trousers or skirt (if not working and not in microgravity), weapon-belt, blouse, cravat (marked as for sash), differently-cut waistcoat (with pockets), loose folded over-robe in formal dress, and likewise cloak with either hood or hat. Women also have the option of replacing skirt-and-blouse with single-piece dress. Either sex may and usually does add jewelry and AR shimmer to all of this.
Tattooing and piercing (except for earlobe) are generally disfavored; the former, because you will change over your lifetime and anything you can communicate with them you can equally well communicate with ad-hoc makeup or a shimmer, and the latter because of a general sense that body modifications should be functional. If it’s not cybernetic, say the fashion mavens, why bother?

Ethics and Virtues

The Fundamental Contract is the most basic set of ethics; it sets out the fundamental natural rights of life, liberty, property, contract, and defense of all of the above. You believe not only in its fundamental rightness – after all, no-one can be an Imperial citizen-shareholder, or even admitted, without agreeing to abide by it – but also that it’s a universal and natural ethic that should be obeyed by everyone, whoever they are and wherever they’re from.
You also respect and try to live by the Nine Excellences (virtue ethics that sit atop the Fundamental Contract), the Five Noble Precepts (a negentropy-based morality), the Code of Alphas (a practical eldraeic morality broken down by daressef), the Eupraxia (a pancritical empiric rationalist guide to correct reasoning and action), and Eternal Progress (“technepraxic”; a science- and knowledge-based morality with an Extropian flavor and emphasis on the virtue of progress).
Said Nine Excellences, the Imperial virtues, are unity (including authenticity and self-integrity), honor (including justice, truth, and clemency), duty (including liberality and tenacity), reason (including wisdom and craft), courage, harmony (including beauty, courtesy, refinement, and the appreciation of excellence), right action, liberty, and dignity (including pride, propriety and temperance).
You’re used to the idea that, while people are equal in rights and before the law, people are not necessarily equal in merit, responsibility or achievement; and you’re comfortable with ranking systems (such as the titles translated as Excellence, Exquisite, Perfect and Paragon) that work on, and advancement on, this basis. Success is admirable; self-improvement is mandatory.
Thus, if it wasn’t for “Defaulter”, “slaver”, “parasite”, “dullist” (someone who believes that being less than you can be is acceptable, essentially), “cacophile”, and “entropist” would be the five most insulting words in the Imperial lexicon.
You believe that knowledge is the most important thing in the universe – well, possibly second to self-integrity – and development of the mind perhaps the most important thing you can do. (Concentrating on physical development is considered rather déclassé – muscles for their own sake are not considered attractive in Imperial society.)
You also believe deep down that enough science can understand anything, and enough technology can achieve anything, and any evidence to the contrary someone might claim to exist merely means that you don’t have enough yet.
You probably own at least a few thousand books, and have read all of them. You think of anyone who doesn’t, or worse, hasn’t, as uncultured, sub-literate, and barely sophont.
You live up to the spirit of your obligations; one who feels obligated only to the letter is to be reviled.
You always seek to civilize and organize your surroundings.
Your expletives, such as they are, are entropic (and often excremental) rather than sexual. Hearing sexual expletives from outworlders confuses you momentarily – why are they swearing by something enjoyable?

At Home

Your house is fully climate-controlled, and probably has considerable automation – or even total automation – and robot servants/assistants to handle cleaning, laundry, and other domestic tasks. If you’re well-off, you probably also have some sophont aides in supervisory positions.
You have a private car, or rather flitter (i.e., flying vector-control vehicle) garaged there. It’s self-driving. You yourself probably can’t drive it on manual; you’ve never needed to, and it’s never occurred to you to try.
If it doesn’t have a wet bar and a trinet terminal, it’s a small flitter. (Big flitters are the ones that have bathrooms.)
Public transit (which mostly means maglev local trains and flowstone slidewalks) in most cities and habs is very good; once you use your flitter to get to a region, getting around within it is very easy indeed. It’s also remarkably luxurious.
If you’re a pedestrian, you would never cross in front of stopped cars/flitters – they never stop, for one thing. You cross under the road. Requiring traffic and pedestrians to intersect is poor urban planning.
You drink strong esklav (neither coffee nor chocolate, but not entirely dissimilar to either), teas, fruit juice, synthdrinks (“soft drinks” in our parlance, minus things-of-nature like fruit juice, etc., but they don’t think of alcoholic drinks as particularly “hard”), wine, beer, or spirits. “Animals drink water. Civilized people don’t.”
You eat at a table, sitting in chairs or reclining on couches. You don’t kill your food; in fact, it’s much more likely that your meat/fish came out of a carniculture vat than from an actual animal, except on special occasions or gourmet restaurants.
The biggest meal of the day is in the evening; technically, the sixth of a possible eight in the traditional cycle, although very few people eat all of them.
You never season your food before eating it. That’s insulting the chef.
There are a number of restaurant chains (Astroburger, Blue Brew, etc.) that you might think of as cheap food, except that nothing you touch, never mind eat, could possibly be described as ‘cheap’. It’s ‘express food’ (sit down to eat it), or ‘transit food’ (drive-ins and drive-throughs), or ‘working food’ (take it back to the office), or some other suitable circumlogism.
Just about anything that can’t crawl off the plate and complain about it is considered food by someone, and you’re probably cosmopolitan enough to try most of those things. Octopodes, cetaceans, canids, and other similarly prosophont animals (or, indeed, plants) are the exception here.
Pretty much every kind of foreign cuisine there is can be found somewhere in the Empire, and the better-known ones you can be pretty sure of finding everywhere.
A bathroom generally means a sunken bath, or a series of sunken baths, normally big enough for a few people; sometimes it means part of the public baths. A toilet, however, will normally be in a separate room.
A hotel room has a separate bedroom (or at least a partitioned alcove) and a private bathroom. If the bedroom is fully separated, it may also have a private dining room.
You’re used to an extremely wide variety of choices for anything you buy, and moreover, to be able to customize everything you buy to your individual requirements.

At Work

You are almost certainly self-employed, enmeshed in a network of contracts, bounty work, etc., which serve instead of Earth-style employer-employee relations. (Even in a restaurant, for example, the waitstaff are independent contractors – the restaurant pays them a retainer to be there, the customer then pays them individually to serve his table.) Even the “Big 26” interstellar starcorporations are relatively small corporate cores with a huge contractual network surrounding them.
Indeed, employment as such doesn’t generally exist in the Empire. Business and individuals generally contract for the performance of specific jobs, but the time-selling relations of “employment” gives away too much control – while it would not be illegal or even immoral to contract it, to most Imperials, it is “unbecoming to the dignity of a free man”.
You pretty much can take all the vacation each year you want; you’re used to only needing to work about a third of a week for most contracts, although you probably work more hours by choice. You expect to be able to take long (multi-year) sabbaticals on occasion, and most people do – at least to raise their children.
You’re intensely distrustful of “welfare” ideas, believing firmly that people should earn a living and not take handouts – mélith has some fairly harsh things to say on the topic of unbalanced exchanges and accepting (or giving) something for nothing. Besides, where would they get the money? It’s not like you can just magic it into existence from thin air.
That said, there is the Citizen’s Dividend, but that’s not money for nothing – that’s the dividend you collect on your citizen-share, which is to say, the profit the government makes on administering public goods, natural resources, and externalities being properly returned to its citizen-shareholders. Besides, everyone gets that, from the fresh-minted underemployed to the long-standing quintillionaire.
Any business, or individual for that matter, will accept a direct credit transfer. And in most shops, this happens automatically – just take what you want and walk out.

Entertainment and Media

Popular entertainment includes music (all forms can be considered popular, except the most gratuitously complicated forms of opera and metatonal), an extensive literary culture (in which SF is the Genre That Ate The Mainstream, better known as “realist fiction”), epic poetry, graphic novels, watchvids (i.e., non-interactive movies and television), InVids, slinkies, virtual-reality games, virtual-reality cosmoi, regular computer games, RPGs, board, card, and other games, mechanical toys, recreational dueling and non-combat challenges, haut cuisine, and participatory sports.
Elite entertainment is much the same. (If asked, an Imperial would point out sniffily that our distinction between high culture and low culture is a product of a class structure rooted in primate status bigotry – which is not a universal trait.)
You’re familiar with Filia Calanté, Laurië Arches, Tirial Sereda, Élalie Celestial, Llanie Celestial, Kalcé Eloünithais, Victoria Diarch, An Ending Not In Fire, “Clockwork Fires, Clockwork Passions”, Facets, “Ah, Yes, The People”, Senior Service, Princes of the Spire, On the Drift, Legends of the Before and Sword Words.
You can drink alcohol, smoke assorted plant products, and ingest assorted recreational pharmaceuticals to your heart’s content, provided that the effects of doing so don’t cause you to break any actual laws. There’s no actual age limit set on this, although what one’s parents and/or tort insurer might say is another matter.
The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are usually authors, artists, scientists and philosophers, with a smattering of entertainers; politicians appear only rarely, and strange and obnoxious individuals are politely invited to do so somewhere else (outside the nearest airlock, for example).
You’re aware that the Imperial Broadcasting Corporation and its news service are only objective in the sense of being “objectively pro-Imperial”, and don’t really attempt to claim otherwise. But you still get most of your news from them anyway.
Foreign media are neither dubbed nor subtitled; they generally come with downloadable language and cultural-knowledge sets which you can insert into your brain for proper enjoyment of the film, etc.
Journalists are expected to keep their collective noses out of people’s private lives. If they actually find something illegal or dishonorable, that’s one thing, but privacy laws and media rep-nets are strict.
You probably know the rules of whatever sport you happen to be interested in yourself, but it’s not likely that you share it with everyone, or even most people, you know. In any case, sports are something you play, not something you watch. Also, any serious sport is played with the mind, not just the body – martial arts and complex physical games are the favored examples, here.
You may well spend several afternoons a week at the local esklav-shop, and/or several evenings a week at the local wine-shop, often playing games with friends while you’re there. The Empire may not have the best café culture in the galaxy, but it’s gone a long way to making it a lifestyle.

Everyone Knows That

A million is 12^6 and a billion is 12^12. Some die-hards still hang onto 16^8 and 16^16 from the Online Emperors’ Great Hexadecimal Reform, but there aren’t many of those.
Likewise, the decimal point is a duodecimal point.
If you’re not a scientist, things are measured in the traditional Imperial system (sic), based on a number of factors intended for maximal convenience. If you are a scientist, you use the same base units, but prefix them with powers of twelve.
Dates are written year-month-day, where month is the month-name, in Imperial Standard Time, and as a single count of pulses, kilopulses, megapulses, etc. in weavetime – with some additional fields for interstellar clock drift and relativistic frame correction. You use the former for commercial and the latter for scientific/engineering purposes. And every world has its own calendar to allow for its own orbital cycles – these vary widely, especially on worlds that are tide-locked, or moons. There are no specific dates carved in the collective memory except for the national (Great Festival of the Empire, Armament Day, etc.), local, and seasonal holidays – which are often pinned to different calendars, anyway.

In Crisis

You’re almost certainly healthy and unused to being sick; and have had regular training-downloads in first aid and other emergency skillsets. You will assume that everyone around you will also react appropriately in case of accidents.
You can count on excellent medical treatment (you have health insurance, which is an insignificantly small expense even for the underemployed). You know you’re not going to die from disease or any but the most severe injury – and only that if you neglect to keep your mind-state backups up to date and your incarnation insurance paid for.
You expect your doctor to treat you like any other hired professional; which is to say, you propose, and they dispose. Doctors are expected to respect your choices, and while they may advise, they may not presume to dictate your lifestyle.
You probably have a situational subpersonality to manage any really severe disasters that occur – but you never expect to use it.
You have the right to bear arms, and you exercise it – usually a pistol-class (it’s actually a flechette-firing mass driver, in the modern era) gun and a short blade. (You learned the arts of sword, gun, and fist as part of your basic education.) You’re suspicious of people who don’t – don’t they have any sense of civic duty?
You are appalled by the thought of violence. How barbaric! Nonetheless, you’re rather good at it, just in case some turns up unexpectedly. You can see no contradiction whatsoever in this.

Love, Sex, Marriage

Marriage isn’t a state matter (and that it is elsewhere confuses you); it’s privately contracted between the spouses. You expect marriages to be for love, not arranged (how horrible – only one step from chattel slavery!), although matchmaking is acceptable. Marriages are actually performed by the couple themselves, but there’s often an appropriate religious attendance, and while the ceremony itself is usually quite short, the attending celebrations often last most of a day.
Marriage is usually for couples, but can be contracted between any arbitrary number of people (technically, legal persons, but this is not an option that is often exercised) of any sex, race, species, clade, etc. Society doesn’t raise many eyebrows at this unless it gets incredibly outré, and even then, the eyebrow-raising stays confined to “That’s odd”, not “That’s evil and should be banned!”
You would never think of rank, wealth, or other forms of status as a barrier to love or marriage. If someone suggested to you that it might be, you might point out that if the Emperor (Leyn I, 1932-2292) can marry a rankless member of the underemployed class, then it’s no problem for anyone else, either. And she made a good Empress, too.
If someone (Senator, businessman… anyone really) has been cheating on his/her spouse, and assuming they survived the breach-of-contract penalties, they’re a Defaulter. And almost certainly unable to continue in any sort of professional capacity, paying cash for everything, and with a long road to walk to rehabilitate themselves, since if a soph’ll break his word to his wife, of all people, why in Tárvalén’s name would anyone else take his oath-contract?
Promiscuity is also frowned upon – while the unmarried may engage in relationships of varying degrees of formality (including the equivalent of friends-with-benefits) with society’s blessing, indulging in one-night stands will attract social opprobrium to either sex.
If a man/woman/herm has sex with another man/woman/herm, it’s nothing particularly notable.
If you’re a woman, whether you can go to the beach (or walk down the street, etc.) topless (your species and secondary sexual characteristics may vary) pretty much depends on where you are in the Empire and what the local culture’s like – not as a matter of law, but in terms of the effect it’ll have on your courtesy rep-net score. In Telesté, forget it. In Eädrin, certainly. Down on the Cyrsan Islands, it’s unusual not to. (The public baths are generally ambisexual everywhere, though.)
You don’t have a taboo against nudity in the media – or sex education, for that matter – but you do insist that it be presented in good taste. (Outworld purveyors of, say, pornography can more or less understand being denounced by the Empire’s Moral Guardians on the grounds that their product is appallingly crass, but still can’t quite wrap their minds around being denounced by said Moral Guardians on the grounds that the participants don’t look like they’re having enough fun. And yes, how to have a good time is also covered in their sex education materials – indeed, with their low birth rate and low risk of accidental pregnancy and STDs thanks to bioengineering, in the modern day, it’s most of them.)
You were probably not born, as such; something within epsilon of 100% of your fellow born-embodied Imperials were gestated in vitro, these days. You probably find the notion of an in vivo pregnancy archaic and rather disturbing. Both your parents were probably present at your decanting, however.
Thus, you think that abortions are a relic of the barbarous past before contraception and in vitro reproduction, and the whole concept really makes you quite queasy.

Religion

Belief in the eikones is somewhat redundant these days, since they now physically exist. It would be like believing in your neighbor, or gravity. It is very likely that you believe in their principles, however, and whether or not you do, they believe in you.
There is an established church, but unlike most state religions it’s run by the state, not the other way around (informally known as “Their Divine Majesties’ Embassy to Heaven“). It doesn’t have sovereign privilege, though, or any but an advisory role in government.
You have no problem with other religions existing around the place, as long as they’re orderly and respect the civilities. Except for some of those exclusive monotheisms, whose insistence on monopoly and on insulting everyone else is just plain annoying.
If you died tonight… well, first, you’d be surprised and annoyed, because you weren’t expecting to do that for a long time, if ever. Then they’d come yank your backup out of your head and have you walking around in a new body by morning.
If you died intentionally tonight, though, they’d come yank your backup out of your head and then upload you to the afterlife, wherein – after hanging around for a while as an ancestral subroutine – you are swirled and mixed and become part of the great Transcendent overmind.

Society

You’re likely to have good social skills of the “civilized” variety.
To you, courtesy is mandatory – even to your most despised enemies – and hospitality is expected as a matter of course.
Once you’re introduced to someone, you continue to call them by their formal name or title until they invite you to switch to the informal form – whatever your relative circumstances.
You find dirt, messiness, litter and so forth distasteful, but pitch in automatically to clean them up, and feel baffled resentment towards those who don’t do their part. Everything around you is kept well-maintained, gleaming, polished, and shiny-bright.
You don’t understand self-deprecation and don’t like humility – to you, it smells like fraud, or at least strikes a very false note. You expect people to be proud of their accomplishments and not afraid to talk them up as much as they deserve.
You appreciate privacy in your own home and office, but are used to being on the record in public, to strangers knowing your name and something about you, and you see constant surveillance/sousveillance as a valuable social tool.
You think most problems could be solved if only people would sit down and agree to do things rationally, and refrain from infringing upon each other’s perquisites.
Race isn’t about skin color, although as a technical term it is about subsets of species in a phenotypic sense. And cladization through biotechnology is much more significant anyway. But socially…
…what’s much more important is whether you’re an Imperial citizen-shareholder, ‘culturally Imperial’ (a best-fit translation for their term which glosses “observer of the Civilities”), an outworlder, or a barbarian. (The difference between the last two is essentially the difference between “strange and unfamiliar culture” and “strange and unfamiliar culture that’s objectionable enough to need a good kicking”.)
You have no knowledge of the streets or underworld – the Empire has no “bad neighborhoods” and very little crime. Its meanest streets barely qualify as curmudgeonly. (Unless you’re one of those free traders bringing the wonders of free trade to assorted prohibitionist civilizations, of course.)
Thus, there’s nowhere in the city you’d want to avoid at night (or at any other time, for that matter).
You expect, as a matter of course, that communications, utilities, and other infrastructure will “just work”. If they don’t work – if a power cut lasts longer than a flicker, for example – it means either a natural disaster, or something that will result in a storm of lawsuits. Replacing equipment is routine.
The road-grid, railways, skyways, etc., are well-managed, largely automated, and run like clockwork. Delays and traffic jams are unusual, and consequently, you tend to treat them as serious problems, or indicators of serious problems.
You aren’t a farmer; in fact, only a few people supplying the luxury food market are. Most food comes from vertical farms or skyfarms, often hydroponic, or carniculture vats.
You aren’t concerned about what family someone comes from these days, unless their entire lineage (not just their House) is prominent among the Names and Numbers.
School doesn’t exist as an institution; you get your primary education at home, from your parents, other family members and friends, tutors and remote courses, and autodidactically.
University education doesn’t have a fixed length – it depends entirely on what you choose to study, as does the nature of your eventual qualification, and you will return to it many times over the course of your life. It’s not free, but first time around, commercial loans or securities against future income are easy to float and not too costly.
You probably speak two languages yourself, your local language and the Eldraeic interlingua. You’d respect someone who speaks more languages (without electronic translation, which is ubiquitous), but you very likely don’t speak them well enough to communicate with a monolingual offworlder.
You went over the generalities of Imperial and local-region history, and a smattering of galactic history, in your primary education; not much else, unless something caught your interest.
Changing your name isn’t particularly difficult, but your old one stays on file as an alias – and most family names and some personal names are trademarks that can’t be used without permission of their owners.
The normal thing, when a couple dies permanently, is for their estate to be divided roughly equally among their children, usually by specific prearrangement, except for any entailed properties – although people permadie so rarely that it never seems all that “normal”.
If a woman is plumper than the average – well, that’s between your personal taste and her ability to carry it off, now isn’t it? (The Empire esteems beauty, but does so according to hundreds of thousands of idiosyncratic personal visions.) If you were to generalize, you’d concede that it helps to be tall, pale, distinctive, and terrifyingly competent, but it’s not like there aren’t a lot of awfully beautiful and/or attractive people out there who have gone the other way on at least the first two of those.

Space and Time

If you have an appointment, you’ll be sure to turn up a couple of minutes late. While you’ll apologize if you’re more than five minutes late, being early (or on time for that matter) is worse.
If you have two appointments – or two events you want to go to – scheduled simultaneously, you don’t hesitate to fork yourself and attend both.
It’s acceptable to simply show up at someone’s place – but your interaction there may be limited to handing over your visiting card, because it’s also acceptable for them not to see you if they’re busy. Most visits – and anything involving a meal – are arranged by invitation.
When you do have a guest, you will offer them a drink and a light snack immediately.
If you invite people over for a meal, it’s understood that you’re providing the food; if they do bring something, it’s understood that you will open it and eat or drink it as part of that occasion, not save it for later.
If you invite people out for a meal, the one doing the inviting always pays the bill.
If you have a business appointment or interview with someone, you expect to have that person to yourself, but the business may take as long as needed in the context. A prolonged business meeting is often a social occasion, too.
When you negotiate, you are polite, of course, but it’s only good business to negotiate sharply. Some foreigners pay excessive attention to status (“Even the Imperial Couple enjoy a sharp deal!“), or don’t say what they mean, and that’s exasperating.
You haggle in markets and “market-style” shops. You don’t haggle in other shops. This applies whatever the products are that are being sold.
You think it’s rude to touch people you’re not intimate with, except to the small degree allowed in meeting rituals. Even then, it’s a fingertip-brush, not a hand-clasp; to shake hands (as a test of strength) would be simply rude. You avoid crowds as a matter of unconscious habit.
If you’re talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about three feet; much the same applies to when you sit down next to someone.

The State

You firmly believe that the Empire doesn’t have politics, and would be very annoyed if it ever started having politics. The job of the government is to keep the absolutely necessary machinery running so that the rest of you can get on with your own lives and otherwise stay out of everyone’s way, and you don’t want to participate in it, thank you so much. That’s their job, and you send off your check every Tax Day so that you don’t have to do it yourself.
Socialism? What’s that? Oh, well, that’s no different from any other political philosophy – it’s an elaborate justification for why theft, forced labor, and oppression are justified this time. (And anyone who defends it or any other political philosophy is at best deluded, at worst insane, or possibly an evil tyrant wannabe.)
Democracy? Codswallop. The only distinction between democracy and autocracy, oligarchy, or whatever, is whether someone’s been clever, bold, and self-aware enough to grab a monopoly on the slaving-bastard trade or if they’re all trying to do it to each other. Look, old chap, if somewhere has politics at all, it’s already undergone a moral collapse and the details are only of interest to academicians and whatever poor bloody kerc-rakhel are stuck living with them.
You think any (income) tax level much above 10% is scandalously high. The constitutional maximum (20%) would be totally outrageous, and 3%-4% is much more reasonable these days. Deliberate progressive taxation, asset taxes, sales taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes, excises and any other such things are no more than legalized robbery.
You take a strong court system for granted, even though you’ll almost certainly never use it. You know that if you went into business and had a problem with a customer, supplier, or partner, you could take them to court; although you’d expect to settle the problem through the mediary system first.
You know, however, that frivolous lawsuits will not only not be rewarded, but will be actively punished by the courts – which includes the assumption of the courts that anything the manual warned you about which you subsequently did is entirely your fault for not paying attention.
You know, there really aren’t that many lawyers. (The legal system has to suffer under the precedent-enshrined notion that so long as you maintain that ignorance of the law is no excuse, you have to actually have laws that a regular citizen-shareholder can learn, discover and comprehend.)
You seriously expect to be able to transact business or deal with the government without paying bribes, and for anyone caught requesting a bribe to be severely punished. (If you do business abroad, you are at least aware of the semiformal legal hypocrisy by which the law takes no interest in any bribing of foreigners you might do; their dishonesty is none of our business, now is it?)
It not only seems natural to you that businesses should be privately run, it seems frankly immoral and possibly perverted that they shouldn’t be. (The only tiny exceptions to that are the natural monopolies, and even then only to the least extent possible – sure, the government can run the power grid because you can’t run multiple companies wires’ to every building, but only the grid, not the generators, for example.)
The police aren’t armed any more heavily than anyone else (which is to say, they’re armed with pistol-class guns); and they’re actually safer to be around for criminals than the average citizen, because they’re obliged to try to arrest them.
However, on the – very rare – occasions that something like a riot or a hostage situation does turn up, the police will happily wave the nearest military force in to clean up the mess and arrest anyone unlucky enough to survive – afterwards, the “unfortunate incident” will be quietly ignored by all.
You find it baffling that anyone would have a problem with executing convicted violent criminals; and will point to the extremely transparent and thorough judicial system as evidence that you don’t run any significant risk of executing an innocent by mistake. The notion that it might be per se wrong is not one you’ve considered anyone might seriously believe.
You expect the Empire’s foreign policy to be run largely for its own benefit – although, as you will point out, this ought also to be for other people’s benefit, too! (Surely even foreign idiots understand about free trade and cooperation being mutually beneficial.) But anyway – they can form their own governments to look after them, can’t they?
You expect the military to fight wars, not get involved in politics (which you don’t have, anyway). You probably know the name of the First Lord of the Admiralty (who is not a civilian), but may not know those of any of the other senior officers.
…at least, you don’t expect the military to get involved in Imperial politics. But you know what happens in the Expansion Regions sometimes, and, well, even if you disapprove, you know what the Expansion Regions can be like.
There is no military conscription in the Empire – why, that’s slavery! Anyway, you’d volunteer, if you were needed, and any country that can’t count on its citizens to do that doesn’t deserve to survive.
Your country has never been conquered by a foreign nation.

Contributions to galactic civilization

You’re joking, right? Everyone knows that the Empire invented civilization.
Despite the Empire being one of the founding members of the Conclave of Galactic Polities, you’re at least partially aware of the cynical compromise that it did so largely to forestall it turning into anything resembling a galactic government – and you don’t really consider it relevant or useful. (The latter mostly because the useful things it does do are all external infrastructure, which you neither see nor, for the most part, use directly, even though you’d miss it if it went away.)
You don’t really need to learn foreign languages except for fun, the Empire having contributed its interlingua (Eldraeic) to the Associated Worlds for general use – or rather, having contributed a worn-down, simplified pidgin version (Trade) that many translators work to/from. This actually annoys you immensely – if people aren’t prepared to learn – or encode – the language properly, they should find something else to speak, not invent some half-assed barbarous jargon with all the subtleties broken off.

Trope-a-Day: Everything is an iPod in the Future

Posted by Associated Worlds

Everything Is An iPod In The Future: “Right now, being cutting-edge is all about plain black and white (maybe pastel colors if you’re lucky), translucent plastic, smoothed edges, screens that slide and flip out, touch screens, unobtrusive buttons, minimalist advertising and displays, lights that come out of nowhere and catchy little chimes when the devices start up. […] Interfaces are designed to be soothing, easy to use and colorful, and if intelligent they’ll probably be annoyingly helpful.”

Well, it’s one element in the aesthetic, sure. But see under Crystal Spires and Togas and Raygun Gothic for more.

Trope-a-Day: Raygun Gothic

Posted by Associated Worlds

Raygun Gothic: The other major influence on the Empire’s aesthetics (albeit adapted to much newer technologies and materials than would be usual), along with Crystal Spires and Togas and – to a lesser extent – Everything Is An iPod In The Future. This one is notably major because for a variety of reasons – some of which involve obvious worldbuilding features and others of which would, if described, sound like a The Reason You Suck speech – its host culture never lost the optimism and essential idea that there’s a big bright beautiful Tomorrow just around the corner, courtesy of Science! (Capital and exclamation point definitely included.) Particularly since they actually did keep arriving.

(This is also why the second movement of their national anthem is just like Make Way For Tomorrow, Today, sung without a single trace of irony.)

Trope-a-Day: Crystal Spires and Togas

Posted by Associated Worlds

Crystal Spires and Togas: Well, the Imperials have the crystal spires down. Although, a little unusually, this wasn’t the follow-on from the “big, shiny, and sciency!” period (that is happening simultaneously) – it’s just that the saerymaharvéi silverlife, descendants of Precursor materials-processing nanites, left the surface of Eliera scattered with giant readily-accessible lumps of crystal right from day one. The school of architecture stuck, intermingled with art deco, the closely related Gernsback style, a soupçon of (often literally) organic designs, and highly polished steampunk/clockpunk/electropunk in-your-face mechanism, even when it’s really ultratech with “holographic” interfaces. With big chrome fins.

Note: this is not a Gilded Age. That’s hammered gold, you philistine.

There are not, however, togas. Also, the technology isn’t all that so-subtle-it-can’t-be-seen; sleek and shiny it may be, but it’s almost as obvious as in Steampunk. Imperials like their tech.

See also: Everything Is An iPod In The Future.