eldrae

At Least It’s Not A Bar?

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“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 spread the word of our discoveries.  Think of what we could learn from it!’

“The second, a kalatri, said ‘Take it to our laboratory, yes, but we must keep this quiet.  It could be dangerous, or disruptive, or corrupting.  It is best that people do not know of it until we can be sure they will not be harmed, and use it well.’

“The third, a codramaju, said ‘We should keep it quiet, but so that we can master it before others know of it.  We could build a hundred new technologies with what we learn, and be wealthy beyond our dreams.’

“The fourth, a linobir, said ‘We should master it for its power.  The elder races built machines powerful beyond imagining.  If this is one of these, the galaxy would be ours for the taking.’

“But the fifth, an eldrae, said nothing – for with the press of a keyswitch, both he and the artifact had vanished away.”

– anonymously-posted extranet joke

Trope-a-Day: Dark-Skinned Blond / Dark-Skinned Redhead

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Dark-Skinned Blond / Dark-Skinned Redhead: While, for various biological reasons, none of the natural eldrae races can really manage dark dark skin (see But Not Too White; engineered clades are, of course, a different matter), the lumeneldrae do get as dark as “copper”; and their range of hair colors runs approximately from the rare silvery-white blonde (the “sunrise eldrae”) through burnished gold to deep, dark red (the “sunset eldrae”).

See also the relevant Ethnographical Questionnaire.

Ethnographical Questionnaire: III. Questions of Race and Ethnicity

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So, I’ve recently been working on answering the “Ethnographical Questionnaire” set of worldbuilding questions for my conculture – not quite this version, but another version by the same person, I think – in the interest of, by so doing, expanding on all sorts of areas and possible unconsidered lacunae in my current imaginings. I thought I’d share each section with y’all as I got it done.

Previously answered:

XII. Questions of Sex

What are the chief races in the region?

Among the eldrae, the original races – for values of original equal to “once the original (limited) population had spread out and settled down enough for these to appear” – were the eseldrae, lumeneldrae, seleneldrae, vereldrae, azikeldrae, and kireldrae, with the alaereldrae and telireldrae appearing later.

Of these, the most common are the first three, the eseldrae, lumeneldrae, and seleneldrae, who together make up about 75% of the population.  The eseldrae [“star people”] are stereotypically eldrae-pale, with nearly-white cream skin tone, dark brown to black hair, and eye colors generally brown, gold, hazel, or amber.  The lumeneldrae [“sun people”], by contrast, are the darkest of any of the eldrae races, being golden, darkening to rosy-copper, with eyes of deep blue and green, and hair colors ranging from a pale silvery-white [“sunrise”] through a deep, burnished gold into shades of deep, dark red [“sunset”], although both extremes are rare.  The seleneldrae occupy the middle ground, being paler than lumeneldrae copper but darker than eseldrae cream, with hair ranging from deep gold to dark bronze and auburn, and eyes of almost any color, merely avoiding the extremes of light and dark.  The seleneldrae are also distinguished by curly hair; while not unknown in other races or found in every seleneldrae, it predominates among them.

Among the less populous races, the first is the vereldrae [“forest people”], a chiefly forest-dwelling offshoot of the seleneldrae, sharing a similar skin tone although somewhat more golden in hue, with hair and eyes both lightened; the former to light gold, brown, and red, and the latter to sea- or sky-blue, or pale green-grey.  Occasional mutations have given some vereldrae hair shot through with green tints, or even plainly dark-of-verdant green.

The second is the azikeldrae [“stone people”], descended from those who moved underground to avoid the Winter of Nightmares and stayed there thereafter.  In hair and skin color, they resemble the eseldrae, but tend to be shorter and more powerfully built (which is to say, by our standards they’re still tall and slender).  Their eyes, however, may be grey-almost-black, dark blue, or even violet.  The azikeldrae also contain a minority subrace who acquired a silverlife infection/symbiosis during their time underground, the “silvertouched”, who are distinguished by metallic “flecks” in their eyes’ irises and sclera (known as “star-flecked”, metallic strands (of actual metal, copper, silver and gold being most common) appearing in their hair, or skin colored gold, copper, gray, or blue from metallic deposition, even sometimes to the extent of acquiring a slightly stony texture or actual freckle-like inclusions of crystal or stone.

The third, and the rarest, are the kireldrae [“first people”], throwbacks to some of the original engineering that made the species in the first place.  Their skin is even paler than that of the eseldrae, to the point of near-translucency that gives it an almost bluish tint from the blood beneath.  They have either very pale or very dark eyes, never in between, often grey, sometimes even silvery, black, or purple.  Their hair is usually dark, although occasional kireldrae of unusually unstable breeding manifest very unusual hair colors – vivid scarlets, dark blues, indigos and purples, even ashen white.

Later, although most unusual offshoots created by genetic engineering either come in all racial varieties (the spacer mods – ignoring, for the moment, the ebony-skinned people who live outside habs, directly in space – for example, look merely like four-armed examples of any of these races) or have morphology determined by other aspects of their clade design, two new races appeared – designated so for numbers, unique appearance, and ability to breed true.

The first of these are the alaereldrae [“ocean people”]; modified to live underwater, with amphibious skin, slightly webbed fingers and toes, and full-body gills, they otherwise have pale skin similar to that of the eseldrae, but marked by a faint turquoise tinge, as is their hair, whether it is dark, blonde, or the mid-blue, ocean-green or jade-green shades also common among the alaereldrae.  (Red hair is unknown among them.)  Their eyes are universally a shade of liquid blue-green.

The second are the telireldrae [“sky people”]; a winged clade designed to fly unassisted on lower-gravity worlds and habitats, they combine seleneldrae skin tone with pale eyes and hair, although not quite as pale as the sunrise hair found among the lumeneldrae; very occasionally dark hair shows up among them, but this is a rare exception.

(By the way, just in case you think it’s kind of racist that no-one here is darker than a Native American, you can find the reason why under “Trope-a-Day: But Not Too White“.  Essentially, the same Precursor genehackery that upgraded their immune systems as part of the whole immortality thing broke the mechanism that releases melanin when cells are damaged by exposure to UV light; they don’t tan, they don’t sunburn, and there’s no evolutionary advantage to spending the energy to make melanin in the first place, which is half the reason that white people evolved *here* in the first place; the skin tones they have are essentially a leftover.

And, also by the way, they did re-invent dark skin later on, per that reference to the ebony-skinned chaps who live in space and can use the radiation protection, and no-one has a problem with that.  So.)

What are the chief ethnic groups of each race in the region? How are they distributed in place?

Well, originally, the chief ethnys around in the Old Empires were the Corones of Upper Cestia and the Alaelaes of Alatia (eseldrae); the Stanné-lin of Selenaria and the Daen-lin of South-East Cestia (lumeneldrae); the Querach-lin of the Crescent, who were also a minority in Selenaria and Cestia (seleneldrae); the Verthraen of Veranthyr and Chielraen of the forests of central Cestia (vereldrae); and the Azikraen of Azikhan (azikeldrae).  The kireldrae were around, but were too rare to form any sort of actual ethny, and neither the alaereldrae nor the telireldrae existed yet.

How do they differ by language, appearance or ancestry?

By appearance, not very, in terms of inborn characteristics, compared to other ethnys of the same race; they didn’t have enough prehistoric time to diversify further in. In habits of dress or culture, it was substantially easier – you could pick out the Querach-lin, for example, by their habit of wearing their armor everywhere but bed or bath, and sometimes even there, and always carrying a damn great axe around; the Daen-lin by not wearing very much at all when they could get away with it; the Verthraen by their movements, shaped by spending much of their life at treetop-height, and dressing to allow them; the Stanné-lin by their elaborate hairstyles and even more elaborately folded clothing; the Alalaes by the seawater in their dress, speech, and movements, and so forth.

In language, things had started to merge by the time of the Old Empires – the Corones, Alalaes, Daen-lin and Chielraen all spoke dialects of Old Cestian, for example, as did the Querach-lin minority there, albeit one flavored with loan-words and formations from the Crescent’s language.  Likewise, the Stanné-lin of Selenaria and their Querach-lin minority also shared a language, one that acquired some flavor from their northern neighbors in Veranthyr, who, along with the Azikraen, kept their own unique ancestral tongue.  Post-Empire, of course, everyone officially spoke Eldraeic, but most of those older languages still exist to one degree or another, if only to add flavor to life.

(There are also, of course, more elsewhere on the world — but I think that’s enough for now.)

What jobs do the chief ethnicities primarily occupy? Are any groups denied work because of racial or ethnic heritage?

Pretty much the same jobs as everyone else, even back in the day, and almost certainly not.

The eldrae are really too innately individualist to really get the hang of racism.  Culturism, that they can manage, and goodness knows more than a few people who were too attached to the bad old days and their coercive ways of doing things found themselves on the wrong end of the swords, rifles, and flame-belching giant mechanical spiders of the Freest of the Free — but if you live and let live and stand by your word, oppressing you or excluding you just ’cause of what you look like or where you came from?  How stupid is that?

What are typical attitudes of the native (or majority) ethnos to immigrants and other ethnicities?

The Empire claims to be generally welcoming to immigrants of essentially any ethny, clade, or species, as the above might suggest, and by and large, it lives up to it – once the immigrants arrive.

That being said, the Empire has always reserved the right to be rather picky about which immigrants it permits to join up.  As an ideological state with an explicit social contract, the Empire is essentially structured as a mutual-benefit corporation of its citizens, and so any prospective future immigrants are expected to show the same sort of deep attachment to the core principles of the Fundamental Contract and Imperial Charter as the original members.  And to put together enough assets to purchase one citizen-share, under most circumstances, by way of demonstrably not being a parasite.  And the Empire also makes no secrets of its broad libertist-technepractic consensus or the Great Imperial Melting Pot, and isn’t exactly interested in recruiting people who aren’t willing to go along with those, in the interests of not setting itself up for ghettoization or future internecine strife.

But, hey, once you get through that gauntlet, you can be a three-eyed nine-armed trilaterally symmetrical soph from a cold-slush planet no-one’s ever heard of, with more cultural quirks than you can perform a situationally appropriate ritual at, and Imperial society will take you to its bosom.  And try and figure out how to make a methane-snow pie to welcome you with.

In short, mind matters; meat doesn’t.  No offense intended to the infomorphs in the audience.

How has any variety of ethnicity in the region changed the society’s culture?

It’s tricky to say in any depth – to cover the listed ones above and the obvious contributions, the Alaelaes brought a nautical tradition and an exploratory urge, the Stanné-lin brought the notion of popular assemblies and sortation, the Querach-lin brought their warrior tradition, the Verthraen brought the best silviculture anywhere, the Daen-lin brought some desperately needed urge to relax occasionally, and so on and so forth.

But it’s safe to say that they all did, and even to the modern day, any new ethny/culture/species turning up in the Empire can expect to be welcomed by lots of enthusiasts wondering “What have you got?  And can we have some?”, culture-wise.

Trope-a-Day: But Not Too White

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But Not Too White: Averted, since this meme never even had the preconditions to become established on Eliéra. The eldrae simply don’t tan in response to UV light, no matter how long they spend working, walking, or basking in the sun.  (Essentially, their ancestors – thanks to the superior immune systems and DNA error-correction mechanisms that go along with their Immortality – no longer gained any evolutionary advantage from being able to tan; and either in the course of that or at some later point, the mechanism broke.  For much the same reason, they can’t sunburn, either – although sunstroke may still be an issue.

Note, of course, that they still have eumelanin – eldrae skin tone does vary, from not-quite-but-almost-albino-white in the eseldrae to coppery in the lumeneldrae, lips and other body parts are pheomelanin pink, and so forth – so the breakage appears to be upstream, in the mechanism that causes melanin release from melanocytes and increased melanogenesis in response to UV exposure.)

Trope-a-Day: Immortality

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Immortality: In a couple of forms.  The natural immortality of the eldrae and galari, etc., is Type II Undying, without the disease (or, indeed, starvation) exception – at least where potent illnesses are concerned.  This is also the type they’ve developed, named immortagens, and sell on the open market.

Noetic backups, in which one’s mind-state (or, if you like, soul) is recorded in digital storage such that you can conveniently be restored from backup if killed, adds Type IV Resurrective on top of that for those two species, and gives it to everyone else living in a modern and civilized polity, too.  And their little dogs, too.  Literally.

(They are, however, still working on A Means To Avoid The Heat Death Of The Universe.)

Common Wisdom

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Cogs and fire can labor; but only man may think.

– Admonitions, Ianthe Claves-ith-Claves Elinaeth

That which has no price has no value.

– Sayings of Covalan, v. 11.

A dream without action is empty; action without a dream is futile.

– commentaries on Cálíäh

Pride is oft expensive; but who would live cheaply?

– Empress Celina I, 2292-2595

A gift freely given ornaments a hall; but an obligation met digs its foundations.

– traditional proverb of Telírvess

The sword slays swiftly; but the bent knee kills forever.

– saying of the philosopher Arlannath

Many cherished ideas burn in the fire of truth, but all that does, should.

– Sung Iliastren, the Father of Science, in “On the Verification of Knowledge”

All peace rests upon cunning words, shared coins, and ready blades.

– Muravani Quelestrios, Minister of State and Outlands

Seek not answers from the gods; ask them only for the right questions.

– saying quoted from “Life of the Seeress Merriéle”

To be good, aspire to the person your friends conceive you to be; but to be great, aspire to the person your bandal conceives you to be.

– traditional proverb of Alatia and Cestia

Three things make a home: walls around it, fires to warm it, and food for all within.

– traditional, source unknown

Be bold, but backed up!

– now-proverbial original advertising slogan of Crystal Flame, ICC

I Can Do No Other

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“When one of the eldrae says he does a thing for you, a simple request will make him cease; for love or hatred, an emotional appeal may serve; for money, a better offer; for mélith, an alternative of equal price; for oath or contract, release by its terms; for reason or principle, a disproof alone will suffice; but should he claim that his qalasír requires it of him, to abandon his course would violate the truth of his self, and he will not do that.  In the face of this, you must concede, adapt, or fight; there are no other alternatives.”

– Excuse Me, Is That Your Pseudopod?: Xenology for the Laysoph, Galényí Selequelios-ith-Idolos

A Penny for How

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“Thus it is said that an eldrae thinks pacing; a dar-bandal, sniffing; a galari, hovering; a kaeth, fighting; a dar-ííche, floating; a sssc!haaaouú, blowing; a mezuar, standing; an esseli, twitching; a codramaju, merging; a kalatri, sitting; a járaph, of itself; a selyéva, basking; a vlcefc, hanging; a spinbright, watching; an embatil, arguing; a múrast, many times; a seb!nt!at, already; a digisapience, continuously; an azayf, afterwards; and a ulijen, too late.”

– Stereotypes of the Worlds, Imperial University of Almeä Press

Naming

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Seeing as that last fic was the first time recently I’ve used the extended eldraeic name-format – or at least its most common version, since various cultures do it differently in some places and times, but this is the one that doubles as the modern International Standard – let’s talk about names and their parts a little:

Elyse Adae-ith-Atridae isil-Cyprium-ith-Avalae Erinlochos, ion-Tiryn, iel-Airin, mis-Eliéra-en-Palar

Elyse

Personal name/forename.  Works just like ours.  It’s often followed by a persona-identifier, which describes who you are relative to the entire identity described by the name, but at the time and place of “Slowly Awakening“, there’s only one of Elyse, and bothering to identify herself as “Elyse Prime” when there aren’t any parallel forks (“Elyse Secundus”, “Elyse Tertius”, etc.) or partial forks or other more complex multiplex identities in play would be less than pointful.

Adae-ith-Atridae

Family-of-descent name.  The format in question is House-ith-Lineage, where lineage is a subset of a House.  (If you think of them as septs of a clan, that’s not too far off.)  It can also be collapsed when they happen to be the same (the founding line of most of the Houses bears the same lineage name as the House name), in which case you can shorten, say, “Claves-ith-Claves” to just “Claves”, but in this case, being of the Atridae lineage of House Adae, Elyse needs to use the full format.

isil-Cyprium-ith-Avalae

Family-of-marriage name, i.e., the House and lineage name of one’s spouse’s family.  Same format, with an isil- prefix in front of it.  This arrangement is fully reciprocal in all cases, so, for example, her wife’s name is therefore “Calcíë Cyprium-ith-Avalae isil-Adae-ith-Atridae”.  (Those in marriages of other topologies than dyads would include all of their spice’s House-and-lineage names here – yes, this can get quite long.  There is also an alternate format for those special lengthy cases in which you give your marriage a name, in much the same way as other corporate entities have their own names.)

Erinlochos

Attributive name.  Covers the whole territory of formalized nicknames, titles, office-names, pen-names, and dozens of other things; most people have more than a few of them.  Most importantly, which one you choose to use is important because it tells people which of the people you are you are being right now, which is something that Imperial etiquette requires you to manage to a nicety.  You are supposed to keep the proper set of Chinese walls in your head and indicators in your speech such that on a family-owned tramp trader, for example, the same two people will always know whether they are having a conversation as captain-and-mate, or husband-and-wife, or business-partner-and-business-partner, etc., etc., and act accordingly.

Which they find much superior to accepting the confusion, fuzzy boundaries and fraternization regulations that we use to patch over the same set of issues.

ion-Tiryn
iel-Airin

Patronymic and matronymic.  (You can use full names, but you aren’t obliged to and usually don’t need to.)  Reasonably glosses as “fathered by Tiryn, mothered by Airin”, or “out of Airin by Tiryn”, depending on your personal taste.  An optional component if further identification is necessary than the rest of your name provides; customarily, women cite matronymics and men, patronymics – because that works best for identity-narrowing given that the custom is also that daughters are counted in their father’s House and lineage and sons in their mother’s – but either has the option of citing both, which is what Elyse does here.

mis-Eliéra-en-Palar

Loconymic.  Where you’re from – it’s actually where you consider yourself from, which is not necessarily where you live or where you were born or where you grew up (although it can be any of these; Elyse uses the last of those, although they live on Galíné, which is an outer-system gas giant moon in the same system).  In the original, ancient system, it would just have been mis-Location, but in these days in which the Empire sprawls over multiple worlds, it’s become mis-Planet-en-Location, just to make it easier for people to keep track.

There are, of course, plenty more optional components, but let’s worry about those when they come up, shall we?

Trope-a-Day: The Beautiful People

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The Beautiful People: I refer you to the comments about “impossibly beautiful sexy immortal billionaire genius demigods” made under Can’t Argue With Elves.  The engineering works, people.  However pretty a people the baseline Eldrae alathis were to begin with – and they were – by the time autoevolution reached the very transsophont Eldrae kirsunar, it had gone Up To Eleven.  The self-designated Supreme Eldrae and their cousin species in the Empire are self-consciously designed to be perfected, unflawed, soul-churningly beautiful, marvelous to behold, exquisite and/or excruciating in unsurpassed elegance.

(And if you’d care to sign up, they can do it for you, too.  Queue for applications starts to your left.)

It’s a sort of inherited status, I suppose, inasmuch as you acquire it – most commonly – by being the offspring of an Imperial citizen-shareholder, although most of it is offered freely to immigrants and, well, anyone who turns up waving checks or cashy money at the right businesses… but since this does represent more or less the entire society, these Beautiful People do, at least those who haven’t yet earned their way into the investor-leisure class, have to work for a living, and many of those continue to anyway.

And yes, the surroundings also match (see: Emotion Bomb and Scenery Porn), because it’s not like they stuck to just improving themselves.  Also played straight, again for almost everyone, with regard to the clothing (see: Sharp Dressed Soph), the housing (see: Big Fancy House), the wealth levels (it is a materially mostly-post-scarcity society, after all)…

In Many Shapes and Forms

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The ecology of Eliéra is uniquely complex in the known Associated Worlds, since it is not, as most are, the product of either natural evolution, or ancient or modern ecopoesis.  Rather, a few unique survivals excepted, its ecology is a mixture of species from three separate origins and their coevolved descendants; referred to as bluelife, greenlife, and silverlife.  It is believed that the progenitors of these ecologies were transported to Eliéra during the tenure of the Precursor species, and in the case of bluelife and greenlife, that their descendants reflect those ecologies which were best fit to survive and adapt to the world in the absence of the Precursors and thus anyone to tend their gardens and biological preserves.

Both bluelife and greenlife are examples of oxygen-breathing ecologies using the common L-protein/lipid-D-carbohydrate biochemistry, with nucleic acid-based information-storage molecules; although the encoding used for these information-storage molecules differs greatly between the two classes.  There is considerable overlap in the specific compounds (amino acids, for example) used by the two classes, to a sufficient extent that heterotrophs and saprotrophs of both classes find the other edible, although in many cases lacking in some essential nutrients.  Indeed, some members of each class, including the sophont species of Eliéra, the eldrae, now naturally require some essential nutrients from each of the classes in their diet.  (The eldrae, among some other large animal species, are particularly notable for having adopted some symbiotic bluelife organelles into an essentially greenlife makeup, giving them their distinctive indigo blood.)

Bluelife, a class including a large number of non-cellular and single-celled organisms, also includes among its complex organisms the majority – around 85% of species – of Eliéra’s plant life (whose distinctive and predominant blue photosynthetic pigment is the source of the name of the class), a smaller percentage – around 75% of its species – of its animal life (including both scaled and furred hexapedal land animals, four-winged birds, duodecids, and tubefish), 90% of its fungi, and all of its algae and plankton.  It is strongly believed to consist of evolved and/or modified forms of life transplanted from the nearby world of Revallá, which used a near-identical biochemical substrate and set of body plans, the more so when Eliéra bluelife’s adaptations to coexistence with greenlife and, to some extent, silverlife are considered.

Greenlife also includes a large number of non-cellular and single-celled organisms, along with another 14% of Eliéra’s plant life (again, the green photosynthetic pigment, chlorophyll, gave its name to the class), the remaining (with very few exceptions) 30% of its animal life (including both scaled and furred quadrupeds, two-winged birds, arachnids, cetaceans, and bony fish), and nearly 10% of its remaining fungi.  The origin of greenlife is unknown; no world currently known to the Imperial Exploratory Service appears to have a compatible ecology.

The final class of life on Eliéra is the silverlife, a class of lifeforms descended from what are believed to be a number of simple Precursor nanites which survived the destruction of the Precursor civilization, many of them mutated by radiation effects and evolved over time.  By far the vast majority of silverlife is composed of microscopic organisms of the crystallite and metallite kingdoms, of which the most notable are the saerymaharvéi, descended from simple assemblers and responsible for the many crystal deposits and outcroppings across the surface of Eliéra.

Silverlife also includes some simple macroscopic organisms, including some silicate pseudo-plants found in sunlit, rocky areas of appropriate compositions (most prominent are cikril, which forms tall, slender columns of translucent crystals, charged with photoelectricity, and cikrieth, a swamp-dwelling variety of cikril which extracts materials from seawater and forms intertwined resource-sharing complexes), and some colonial organisms roughly analogous to slime molds.  These together make up the remaining 1% of Eliéra’s plant species, and 0.5% of its fungi.

Silverlife in general has many aspects and features in common with the lower lifeforms of Galáré, the homeworld of the galari; while the evidence suggesting their origin in Precursor nanotechnology remains convincing, scientists are studying the possibility of a link between known Precursor nanotechnology and the ecosystem of this world.

– An Introduction to Eliéran Biology, Imperial University of Almeä Press

Trope-a-Day: Emotion Bomb

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Emotion Bomb: Played straight with, essentially, the “glamor” that comes along with the (see Can’t Argue With Elves) whole engineered-over-millennia impossibly beautiful immortal genius demigod thing.

Somewhat subverted because it’s an entirely – well, mostly – unintentional effect of the eldrae trying to live up to their incredibly high opinion of themselves; they were going down this road well before they’d ever met any other species.

Completely subverted in that they really wish you’d pick yourself up off the floor, look them in the eye, remember that there probably is something to be said for you/your species, and ideally, if it bothers you that much, try to be less ugly, stupid, and ephemeral.  Here’s a catalog.  First product’s free.

And while it’s not as blatant as most examples of this trope, it’s amazing what the subtle deployment of memetics in dress, architecture, body language, etc., can do, given time to work its magic…

Trope-a-Day: Can’t Argue With Elves

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Can’t Argue With Elves: The eldrae, and indeed the Imperials in general, so not just the Space Elves, live this trope, being profoundly elitist and unashamedly, even if they bothered to notice, arrogant about their superiority in almost every way to anyone else and generalized personal awesomeness.  That literally thousands of years of bio-, nano-, and sopho- technology actively directed at (and succeeding in) creating an entire society of impossibly beautiful sexy immortal billionaire genius demigods – coupled with a pressure-cooker of a culture that demands personal striving for perfection and considers pride in the result a virtue – actually lets them back this attitude up most of the time is just icing on the hubris cake, so far as everyone else is concerned.

Really, the only things that make them tolerable at all is (a) their complete and utter refusal to demand any special privileges or position because of their utter awesomeness, even if that’s just because they can’t tolerate the thought of only being comparatively awesome rather than absolutely awesome (a.k.a., “What sort of pathetic excuse for a Superior Race has to actually keep the Inferior Races down?  Newsflash, morons, that means you weren’t qualified for the position in the first place.”), and (b) the way in which they’re willing to, and even insistent sometimes on, selling beauty, genius and immortality to the rest of the galaxy so that they can stop having to put up with all these ugly, ephemeral morons.

Actually, that doesn’t make it any better.

(All of this may not be strictly true as written, of course: it was written, as it were, from the point of view of the people who find themselves on the wrong end of it.)

(Also, it occurs to me, somewhat subverted by the fact that they greatly prefer it when people Argue With Elves.  I mean, they still believe that they’re right about everything, and probably aren’t going to agree with you unless you have a really good argument, but they will respect you more for trying.)

Trope-a-Day: Space Elves

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Space Elves: Yeah, yeah, yeah…  (Says so right in the subtitle, see?)

Well, let’s just say that many, many years ago (say twenty) there was a lot more fantasy in my speculative-fiction worldbuilding, which didn’t quite wear off until somewhat fewer years ago (say ten).  The remaining elvishness (see: Our Elves Are Better) of the eldrae is a combination of that part which I consider justified, and that part which is pure legacy code.  (And that get their essential body plan the scientifically-justifiable way; see Human Aliens.)

And in the genre that brought us, say, the asari, the minbari, the vulcans, the syreen, etc., etc., and plenty of even physically closer-to-elvish examples, I’m not exactly worried about it, either.

Trope-a-Day: Our Elves Are Better

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Our Elves Are Better: Well, of course they are.  I refer you to the comments under Can’t Argue With Elves, etc., in re impossibly beautiful sexy immortal billionaire genius demigods.

Probably closest (although not all that close) to the High Elves stereotype, although averting the whole Medieval Stasis thing quite dramatically with For Science! and its industrial consequences.  And while the super-sumptuous clothes and the delicate jewelry is about right, historically they preferred swords with a bit more heft to them than a rapier, and clockpunk auto- or pocket-crossbows.  (In the modern era, they prefer Very Large Guns, big stompy Powered Armor suits, and antimatter grenades, a weapon combination which one imagines would make actual elves blanch.)

And while Cultural Posturing is sometimes in play – although, as I point out, who isn’t it in play for? – they’re quite willing to admit members of other species, or more accurately other cultural groups, to the People As Awesome As Us club.  Once they get to know them, anyway.

To cover other things, played straight:

  • As per the High Elf stereotype, taller and slimmer than humanity.  Also lithe and nimble, but (an aversion here) not fragile in the sense of either Fragile Speedster or Squishy Wizard – among the things that come along with immortality are toughness and a pretty solid immune system, otherwise that immortality wouldn’t be worth the genome it was encoded on, now would it?
  • Pointy Ears, yes, if no larger than human ears.
  • Long lived (naturally possessed of what would be called the Lesser Immortality, i.e., never aging past a certain point, although being able to be killed).  No reincarnation, however, at least not until they got around to inventing it.  Are not quite immune to Who Wants to Live Forever?, but definitely don’t suffer from it until time periods measured in millennia have passed.  And yes, accompanied by relatively low birth rates.
  • While not no facial hair, limited facial hair; small beards and moustaches only.
  • Yes, very, very pretty; exactly an Inhumanly Beautiful Race.  Of course, they started out merely distinctively pretty.  The modern situation has to do with millennia of competitive genetic engineering to turn this up to eleven (hah, almost typed “up to elven”) and beyond, to the point at which they’re probably a walking danger zone to other hominids who haven’t grown up around them.  (Or else plunge straight into the Uncanny Valley… after all, mythologically, the sidhe were probably in this sort of territory, and yet if you were looking for adjectives to describe them, you’d reach for eldritch before you got to hot, right? Right.)

And averted:

  • Not terribly big on respecting nature in a Green Aesop sense.  (Although they would, in the general case, point out that they are nature, and therefore the things they do are also a part of nature, so therefore, for example, the mighty pile of concrete and stone that is the Merianreth Gorge Dam is every bit as natural as, say, a beaver dam – and every bit as beautiful, but then, understand that an eldrae would gaze appreciatively upon the beauty of a well-constructed oil refinery).  But science is good, and technology is good, and while nature is doing its best against entropy in a blind and undirected sense, now that there are minds in the universe, it can be improved, or rather clarified, into what it ought to be.  Gardens are beautiful, but they need gardeners.
  • In the Space Elves sense, while they do have access to both Organic Technology and some Crystal Spires without Togas, both are mere subsets of a much larger set of technology, in which they are not the absolute majority.
  • Not magical; there is no magic in this universe.  Such Psychic Powers as there are are exactly as magical as WiFi.
  • Hair colors other than those mentioned do exist, as does curly hair.  (In some rare cases, mostly kireldrae, aquatic clades, and the silvertouched, so do some of those unnatural hair colors.)
  • While they do make things that are designed to be beautiful, durable, delicious, and just plain better than anything else they might be competing with, the Creative Sterility is very definitely averted.  Remember, this is For Science! (and For The Arts!, for that matter).
  • Not all that much of a strong warrior tradition, as a species.  The sentinel darëssef (see: Fantastic Caste System) has one, but it’s hardly the biggest of the darëssef; any of the aesthants, the executors, the plutarchs, the technarchs and the hearthmistresses are more plentiful.

And yes, they certainly can claim to be above being above people.  Only inferior species need to put other species down to feel superior.

The degree to which I may have been influenced by Jürgen Hubert’s Elves: A Case Study of Transhumanism In Fantasy Worlds is actually not all that great – concepts predate, etc., as I’ve been working on this universe for a long time – but it’s still worth reading anyway.  See also the Real Life section of the trope’s comment on what we might do to ourselves if we acquired good human genetic engineering.

Trope-a-Day: Inhumanly Beautiful Race

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Inhumanly Beautiful Race: Quite possibly, since the eldrae started out a very pretty people and have been engineering further in this direction for a long damn time; of course, it’s not like they aren’t happy to sell this technology on the open market in the interests of a more beautiful universe.  (And, of course, assuming they don’t fall directly into your Uncanny Valley; the trouble with being a product of postsophont genetic engineering is that you look like a product of postsophont genetic engineering.  This troubles the eldrae not at all, but your awe/unease/horror/fear may vary.)

Trope-a-Day: Uncanny Valley

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Uncanny Valley: Largely averted where other species are concerned, simply because they’re far enough apart in appearance from each other that it never comes into play.  (Now, eldrae and humans, both being humanoids, are probably close-and-yet-far-away enough to fall right into this where each other are concerned – proportions off, and yet too perfect, too serene, move too smoothly, body language is all wrong – yet another reason why I don’t plan on touching that particular First Contact.)

A recognized phenomenon in robotics design where androids and gynoids are concerned; mostly averted in practice because it is a recognized phenomenon, and so cybershells of this kind tend to be either very, very good indeed, or deliberately robotic enough not to trigger it.  And if you really want something that looks that human species-like, you can always go bioshell.  Of course, much the same thing applies to bioshells with certain types of extreme augmentation, which their designers have to take into account.

This whole thing, of course, is all inconvenient enough that it’s an instinct the bioengineers are working hard on ripping out through their xenophobia elimination program…

Trope-a-Day: Alien Blood

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Alien Blood: Played straight, in many varieties.  For example, eldrae blood is close to indigo in color, due to the not-hemoglobin it uses (borrowed from Elieran bluelife, which is indeed mostly blue; and it would lead to noticeably different skin tones if they weren’t all so damn pale anyway).  Kaeth blood is silvery-white, and notably conductive.  Myneni “blood”, really crystalplasm, is whitish and feels sandy.  Esseli blood is red-orange, and mirilasté blood is a fluorescent magenta.