THE MONTH IN BRIEF
Bella continued to work on the very complex code for companies and factories, so we didn't see much that was new being added to the game during the early part of November.
One new command that was added was 'DI PLANET planetname', enabling players of all ranks to find out about each of the worlds in the Solar System.
Promotion requirements for the rank of Adventurer were lowered again: Captains now only had to toil hard enough to get 1,000 hauling credits, instead of the 1,500 previously required. This pleased everybody except those that had recently promoted to Adventurer, who were furious that the requirement had been changed. After all, if you had to suffer through 1,500 hauling jobs, why should the new young Captains have it any easier? Why, in your days you had to haul until your fingers bled, in the darkness of space, with no heating in your ship, backwards, not wearing a vac suit, and sometimes with not even a ship!
The Halloween puzzle planet, Nightmare, proved very popular with players - even if the puzzle was a bit too easy. The first player to solve it was Pesoge.
The ibgames web site had another make-over, sprucing it up in an effort to make it more attractive to new players.
PROPERTY CRISIS HITS SOLAR SYSTEM
Too many merchants are building warehouses all over the Solar System, says a new report published this week by the radical think-tank The Thought Shack. The building boom is causing a shortage of land for other uses, including vital needs such as housing and agriculture.
The situation is particularly bad on the smaller moons such as Castillo, or on worlds such as Mercury where only a small part of the surface is suitable for erecting the heavy-duty domes needed for protection.
And it's only going to get worse, said spokesthing Rad Galoopitz at a press conference to publicise the release of the report. "It won't be too long until this unbridled capitalism goes up another notch, and we start to see factories being built all over Sol, accompanied by monster depots that will crowd the landscapes of our planets and leave no room for anything else."
It pointed out that things were different before the so-called constant catastrophe*, when building was restricted in the Solar System but factories could spread freely onto planets outside Sol, but that since the failure hyperlink technology, humankind's activities were confined to the home system, where space and resources were finite.
M Galoopitz said the only hope was the knowledge that scientists were working hard to reopen the hyperspace link. "Only when Sol can once again spread itself through the stars, will the pressure on Earth and all the other home planets be eased. It's going to be a race against time - will we have access to the stars before we run out of space completely?"
A Galactic Adminstration official was sceptical about the Through Shack report. "There's thousands of asteroids out there with space for factories and depots," said Euphonia Bleeg from the planning department. "If space gets tight on Earth, factories can always move out to the asteroid belt. Humans are endlessly adaptive - what seems like a potential crisis now will be solved before it becomes critical. We'll work something out, we always do."
* See Galactic Encyclopedia entry on The Interregnum.
GENDER AWARENESS
The Galactic Administration's wheels turn exceedingly slowly, as you would expect from a great creaking bureaucratic machine. It reacts to changes in society at about the speed of a glacier creeping down a mountain. Sometimes this sluggishness is useful, since it stops laws being enacted as a knee-jerk response to issues of only momentary importance.
But when a societal change takes root and becomes permanent, the GA can get left behind, to the detriment of those affected by the paradigm shift.
Such an issue is that of gender awareness. Traditionally, humans come in two genders: male and female, and all the laws and customs of society reflected that. But for centuries now, things have not been that clearcut. Artificial intelligences and droids of many kinds cannot be said to be either male or female, so view themselves as neuter, but although granted limited rights by the Galactic Administration, the law insisted that they define themselves as either male or female.
The spread of humankind to the stars led to encounters with alien beings of all kinds, including those with many more than two genders - or no recognisable gender at all. Yet still the GA wanted to call them "men" or "women".
Back in the Solar System, the contact with so very many different ways of existing led to new generations of humans being unwilling to constrict themselves to just two genders, and the ease of changing sex back in the days of Ming, led to much experimentation on the part of those struggling for identity.
And yet, the Galactic Administration continued to insist that every being it encountered, whether human, droid or alien, be classified as either male or female.
Until now.
Finally, after centuries of tireless campaigning by pressure groups such as the Campaign for Gender Neutrality, and the radical protesters known as Neuter Nutters, the Galactic Administration has acknowledged the existence of other options.
Its solution is not to try to increase the number of classifications to cover all eventualities - in the case of some aliens, such as multi-gendered Sphinxians who recognise 134 different genders, that would be ludicrous! Instead, they have added a third classification to the traditional male and female - neuter. This more or less counts as "none of the above".
So, computers have been reprogrammed, databases have an extra field, forms have been redesigned, and now the Galactic Administration is fully prepared to accept that a person can be neither male nor female, but something other - neuter.
Of course, many organisations that manage to react and change faster than the tortoise-like GA have accepted the third gender classification for years, and have evolved their own polite forms of address which acknowledge that not everyone is included in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen". The Galactic Administration has now adopted the most common of those words. The honorifics added to a persons name are Mr, Ms and M (for male, female and neuter beings respectively). So a neuter droid called Robby would politely be called M Robby.
To the possessive pronouns "his" and "her" is added a third option, "hir". For example: His marsrat looks a bit poorly, her spaceship is over there, hir tentacles need cleaning.
Hir is also used in the same way as the personal pronouns "him" and "her": I bought him a pint of Diesel's Old Peculiar, I do not like her very much, I would go out with hir if only hir tentacles weren't so icky.
When talking about a group of people of mixed gender or species, the term "beings" is used, and when formally addressing a crowd one can either use the long form "ladies, gentlemen and others" or the simplified "gentle beings".
Of course, one could always emulate the example of our beloved editor, who addresses everyone as "Darling" to avoid having to remember names or make guesses about gender!
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