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Utopia: Well, the Imperials would certainly like to think that they live in one, or at least an asymptotic approach to one, anyway. Of course, as we pointed out back in Imperial Dream, the Empire is a utopia for people who think the way that the Imperials think people ought
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Uterine Replicator: Or, as it’s known locally, the exowomb. Ubiquitous. (Although neither mendacious nor polyglottal.) I mean, “In vivo? How quaint.” For values of quaint, that is, equal to “Gods below, what is this, the primordial reign of chaos and darkness? With stone knives and bearskins?” Because even leaving
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(As a side note, please permit me to apologize for the lack of new fic content over the last few days. I appear to have once again contracted some sort of death plague that is playing merry hell with my creativity, so I’m just sitting around crunching numbers, popping
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Urban Segregation: Averted in the Empire, at least in the prestige/class-based sense, mostly because the sort of class structure that results in people of different classes (especially wealth-based classes) declining to associate in the segregationist sense is an outgrowth of primate relative status hierarchies and exclusivist signifiers. Since the
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Uplifted Animal: Quite a few, in the interests of adding people with different points of view and abilities to the population (see: Intelligent Gerbil). Of the greenlife – and therefore recognizable to Terrans – animals, most prominent are the dogs (dar-bandal), cetaceans (dar-ĂĂche), octopi (dar-cĂşlnĂł), rat kings (dar-celmek), and ravens (dar-vorac). Averted
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Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Played slightly straight, inasmuch as that given the degree of species and clade diversity to be seen in cosmopolitan regions (most of the Empire, the Conclave Drift, the Rim Free Zone, the Free Eilish Confederacy, other hub worlds, etc.) is sufficient that merely looking weird will not
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Unusual Euphemism: Eldraeic, by and large, is not a language given to a great deal of euphemism. Circumlocution, yes, but not so much euphemism, as its principal speakers prefer their straight talk to be straight. For example, polite society has no problem with people just saying straight out: valdar sessqár
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(Sorry for the delays in the next part of Darkness Within, folks – having some trouble getting it to gel in my head.) The Unpronounceable: Quite a few, due to all those species that don’t use spoken language the way we understand it: as mentioned previously, esseli names are DNS
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Unlimited Wardrobe: Played mostly straight – the flexibility is not unlimited, after all – by smart clothing, which can offer a variety of style modifications (via inbuilt MEMS), color changes, and other self-reshaping properties on the fly. (And, of course, at home there are cornucopia machines.) Played entirely straight by virtual clothing
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Universal Universe Time: Subverted. On the one hand, it’s played straight; just about all of the Associated Worlds sync to empire time/weavetime, the consensus establishing-a-common-relativistic-reference-frame timebase agreed to and broadcast by all the stargates – see Microts for more details – so that there’s some agreement with everyone else
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Universal Ammunition: Not quite universal, but so far as regular guns go (see Bottomless Magazines for the description), there are very few different types of standard magazine cartridges (metal for slicing up), powercells (which are just the fast-discharge versions of regular battery equivalents), and heat sinks which cover virtually everything
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Ungovernable Galaxy: A reflection of the truth, long before you get to the size of an entire galaxy, at least when you’re talking about centralizing-hierarchist structures. As they scale up, they start bottlenecking horribly – there’s a reason why most growth patterns matching this structure stall out well before