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To Absent Friends: Played straight, with extra poignancy added for more cosmopolitan Imperials due to the number of people who are absent because of death from old age, which in the outworlds thereâs more of around than they might care to think of. Often turns into something of an
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Time Travel: Present in very limited forms: the kind you can do with wormhole shortcuts and relativistic travel (whose primary usage is permitting physics grad students to actually observe local causality violations), and the kind that lets transcendent AIs whisper to themselves from the future via acausal logic. In both
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Time Abyss: The members of the assorted naturally or artificially immortal species of the modern day still havenât been around long enough for this â although the Empire contains plenty of people who are older than all Earthâs modern nations, and at least a few who are older than
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Thrown Out The Airlock: While purportedly an old space tradition to deal with pirates and mutineers, in practice, the penalties attached to littering anywhere remotely close to a trafficked orbit and the sheer waste of organic compounds are more than enough to persuade most salty spacedogs to Just Shoot âEmâŚ
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Second Law My Ass: I hadnât actually written anything for this one â Iâm not sure it existed when I made the relevant pass â but in the light of our last trope, I should probably address it. I should probably point out that while that last trope is averted,
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Three Laws Compliant: Averted in every possible way. Firstly, for the vast majority of robots and artificial intelligences â which have no volition â theyâre essentially irrelevant; an industrial robot doesnât make the sort of ethical choices which the Three Laws are intended to constrain. You can just program it
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(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
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Thicker Than Water: While the Houses (extended family-clans) are an important part of their social structure, the eldrae are really too individualistic to play this one entirely straight; and, well, principles are thicker (see: Honor Before Reason, Principles Zealot). In practice, most do pay rather more than lip service to
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There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Usually averted by the Imperial Military Service and those following its fine military tradition â although that tradition also suggests itâs a good idea to have it available to use. Because itâs unsubtle, and inelegant, and for a sophisticated people of great strategic
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(Missed this last night, oops, so have some catch-up.) There Are No Therapists: Averted, if technically true. Which is to say, these days, you take your mental problems â or indeed, any mental imperfections you feel you might have â to a psychedesigner, who will edit your mind-state to not contain whatever
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Theme Naming: As is traditional, variants of this apply to just about every starship class ever manufactured, and a whole pile of classes of other vehicles, too. Also weapons from various manufacturers, some ranges of computers, and most of the other products about which people are prone to anthropomorphize.
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That Makes Me Feel Angry: As mentioned under I Do Not Speak Nonverbal, due to the difficulty in handling cross-species expressions and body language, many people with translators end up talking this way. âPolite clarification: This way, actually.â Alternatives do exist, including attitudinal v-tags, rebus emoticons, simulated expression-translators, and so