Mercurian, as in "from Mercury". So I've been meaning to write this short story which is largely supposed to be a parody of military sci fi. The basic idea is that the protagonist is a soldier in a human army involved in a war against evil space robots/alien bugs/other clichéd space opera bad guys. The twist, highly un-twisty to those familiar with Eclipse Phase, is that the humans are bioconservative fanatics and that the "aliens" are merely odd-looking trans/posthumans who have no interest in a war with the humans. Think of it as the Iron Dream meets Starship Troopers meets, of course, Eclipse Phase. But since I, in my vanity, value the illusion of creativity, I'm loathe to simply steal the Jovian Junta as the protagonist's faction. So I was thinking about other interesting places in the Solar System where one could pop down human supremacists, other than Ganymede and the rest of the Jovian System. The thought struck me, "Why not Mercury?" Mercury has a surface gravity of 0.377 g, very close to that of Mars, despite its smaller size. This is highly convenient if we want unmodified humans to live there. Mercury has a (theorized) abundance of various minerals that a militaristic craphole would want. Despite being in the Inner System, the Sun's gravitational well makes travel to and from Mercury highly inconvenient, making isolation despite relative closeness to Venus, Earth and Mars possible. And for some reason I imagine the short distance to the Sun enables the state to make grandiose territorial claims, calling itself the "Solar Something" and claiming all of the System as its rightful territory. But above all, the potential for producing lots and lots of antimatter interests me. Using solar power, the Mercurian Junta could churn out and stockpile enough antimatter missiles to scare off any potential liberators. Think of it like North Korea: Small, dumb and loud, but with enough potential boom to make other states vary of an intervention. Anyway, I thought I would share that little idea with you guys, since Mercury in Eclipse Phase is not really used all that much by anyone particularly interesting. (Well, okay, I guess the sifters are kind of cool. As cool as anyone can be on Mercury.) So if you want to free up the Jovian System for some other faction but still keep the loud-mouthed biocons somewhere: Why not Mercury? Just an idea!