The English tongue has had to make some accommodations in the last three hundred years. These are some of the words you might expect to see scattered about the worlds of Looking at the Big Sky.

biogen (by·oh·jən)

A sapient person of biological, rather than technological, origin.

centaur

A sapient person whose consciousness integrates both biological and technological aspects.

link

A direct brain–computer interface, practically omnipresent in 2338.

neuréseau (nur·ez·oh), plural neuréseaux

A non-sapient neural network — think Deep Blue or ChatGPT¹, rather than Hal or our own Sejong.

Persephone

The tenth planet from the sun, known in our time as Eris.

sapien (say·pee·ən)

A person; a being that is, as the name suggests, sapient, cognisant of itself and its place in the world.

synthien (sinth·ee·ən)

A technogen using a robotic body to interact with the physical world.²

technogen (tek·noh·jən)

A sapient person of technological, rather than biological, origin. (Artificial intelligence is a terribly vague term, spanning everything from era-defining statesmen to chess-playing programmes, and many technogens feel it implies them to be less “real” than everyone else.)

Yggdrasil (ig·drə·sil)

Poetically, the solar system, or the people within it, or sapien civilisation as a whole — it can be a bit nebulous, but it all derives from the same notion of a “world-tree” of nine realms. (Which one of the ten planets gets shafted depends — usually you’ll see Pluto and Persephone lumped together; sometimes Neptune too, so that Selene gets to be its own thing.)

Yggdrasilian (ig·drə·sil·ee·ən)

Interplanetary; encompassing every inhabited world in the solar system.

žirec or jirrit (jih·rit)

A derogatory term for a baseline human, or more generally, any kind of luddite. Derived from the Intermarine alžirec “Algerian”, referring to the Algerian theocracy’s long-standing technophobia throughout the 21^st and 22^nd centuries.