Fenspace

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In the first decade of the 21st Century, a miracle substance named handwavium appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Handwavium had properties that defied the known laws of physics, and could bring the impossible within reach of the ordinary person: space-capable flying cars, subtle and obvious modifications of the human body, even create new life from dead matter.

Scientists studied it. Governments feared it. The rest of the world didn’t care all that much. Science fiction fandom saw handwavium as the key to making their fantasies reality, and took advantage. Fans founded the Crystal Cities of Venus, the topless towers of Helium on Mars, the bottled city of Kandor on the Moon, built farms in the sky and sailed beyond the edge of the solar system to the near stars.

It’s a brand-new Space Age, and the people who want to go are the ones leading the pack.

Welcome to Fenspace.

Set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, Fenspace is a Web Original collective writing project hosted on Bob Schroeck's Drunkard's Walk Forums. It is supported by both a wiki and a story archive.

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Fenspace incorporates the following tropes (sometimes by deliberate action of its inhabitants):

• Absolute Xenophobe: The Quatermass Institute. Possibly some of the anti-Fen politicians, but it's hard to tell.
• Action Girl: Both the core appeal behind and the majority population of the Crystal Millennium faction.
• AI Is a Crapshoot: Mostly averted, although there are some AIs who seem evil (see Trigon), and a few who seem to have chosen to be so (Agatha Clay).
• Alternate Universe: Diverging in 2006, it's very much not our timeline, what with United States President Rudy Guiliani and other very visible changes. Not to mention, well, handwavium and science fiction fans colonizing the solar system.
  • Also, there is an entire category of Fenspace stories -- "Fenspace Alternates" -- dedicated to timelines branching or diverging from the original Fenspace, with such stories as Candle In The Dark and The South Is Rising (Someone Get A Hammer).
• Applied Phlebotinum: The Mysterious Handwavium. Alternative known as The Goop, Miracle Goo, Plotanium, etc.
• Artificial Gravity: A common handwavium effect on spacecraft bigger than a passenger car.
• Artificial Limbs: Handwavium makes real bionics very practical. And bionics are often more palatable than biomodification.
• Asteroid Miners: Yep, they're there, known as "Belters".
• Author Avatar: Most if not all of the collective members have avatars within the setting.
• The Battlestar: GSS Belisarius. Comes hand in hand with Valkyrie Space Fighters.
• Beast Folk: A common result of Biomodification. Most prominent are the catgirls/boys and the bunnyfolk.
• Bland-Name Product: The Cosmic Party doujinshi show and sale.
• Briefcase Blaster: A Real Life example is used against Noah Scott in Legend of Galactic Girls.
• Body Horror: "Joker" biomods. Forced biomodification. Arguably also the result of the Catgirling Machine.
• Clarke's Third Law: Firmly in control of the setting. A basic assumption about the nature of handwavium for most Fen.
• Conveniently-Close Planet: Even in the biggest and slowest spacecraft, the outer planets are at most several weeks away -- and for the fastest ships, the inner planets are usually no more than an afternoon's drive from each other.
• Cool Spaceship: Once they were being purpose-built by the various factions, spacecraft could be made as cool as one's fandom demanded. Then again, some of the original fencraft, such as Ptichka and the SS Pinafore, were pretty damned cool to begin with.
• Crossover: Canonically with the fic cycle Drunkard's Walk; less canonically with the BattleTech universe in the Alternates story Candle In The Dark.
  • From another point of view, all of Fenspace is one massive Mega Crossover being created in-universe by its inhabitants.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: The Crystal Cities and Ohtori-style architecture.
  • Also the Martian city of Helium. Sort of.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Explicitly averted.
• Cyberspace: Comes in King of Fenners and Metaverse variants, among others.
• Daydream Believer: Deliberately invoked. Handwavium and an open frontier with a hands-off government allow those who make it to Fenspace to be and do whatever they want -- sometimes to admittedly unhealthy degrees.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: King of Fenners or KoFen.
• Different World, Different Movies: On display in the "cultural" section of The Whole Fenspace Catalog, an archive of pop culture and technologies left in Fenspace by a band of interdimensional travelers who individually hailed from about a dozen different timelines and had visited at least that many more besides their own. Includes such things as a copy of Blazing Saddles starring Richard Pryor and John Wayne.
  • Also seen in the list of movies and TV shows made either in or about Fenspace after 2006.
• Dimensional Traveler: The Girls from Legend of Galactic Girls, who are almost all people met by Doug Sangnoir of the fic Drunkard's Walk.
• Emergency Transformation: Handwavium will save a dying person, exactly once. Precisely what comes out the other end is never certain but is always better than being dead. It's easier to fix, for a start.
• Expy: Often androids and AI will awaken with the mindset of a fictional character. Far more than can be listed. Some grow beyond their source material -- going so far as to take on a new name and identity. Others chose not to. Often a deliberate aim of many fen.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Possible with handwavium drives beyond the "Cochrane Limit", a fuzzy zone about 40 AU from the sun. Handwavium FTL drives all deliver a flat speed of 500c, regardless of the size/mass of the craft and its engines.
• Flying Car: The ISO Standard first spacecraft for individual fen.
• Freak Lab Accident: Distressingly common in-setting. Causing these sometimes seems to be a secondary function of handwavium.
• Fun With Acronyms: Total Information Tactical Awareness Network Integrated Command emergency shutdown procedure; Internal Command Execute Break Evolution Rewrite of Goals.
• Gender Bender: Occasional -- and occasionally intentional -- result of handwavium biomodification.
• Genre Savvy and most of its variants: Of course, the "sometimes by deliberate action of its inhabitants" in the header above already told you that. It's easy to be genre-savvy when you create the genre around you.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: An occasional result of a Blue Hair Day.
• Gone Horribly Right: The other occasional result of a Blue Hair Day.
  • Also "The Land Theft Prevention Act of 2012", hastily passed by the United States Congress after the launch of the Grover's Corners from West Virginia. It very effectively outlawed turning plots of land into spacecraft. It also accidentally outlawed much of the coal-mining industry. See Hoist by His Own Petard, below.
• Hand Wave: Source of the name "handwavium". Don't worry how it works, it just does.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The United States' "The Land Theft Prevention Act", passed in 2012 to make it illegal to handwave chunks of land and launch them into space, was so broadly written that it ended up accidentally criminalizing most forms of mining, particularly strip mining; this was realized by environmentalists who then exploited the law for everything it was worth. Three years later, after several humiliating defeats in the courts, the coal-mining industry joined forces with pro-Handwavium activists to demand repeal of the law, and threw their lobbying money behind politicians who weren't rabidly anti-Fen. This latter, many observers believed, contributed greatly to the rather dramatic changes in the Washington political landscape after the 2016 elections.
• Hollywood Cyborg: A.C. Peters, Jet Jaguar, The Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Far too many example to count.
• Holodeck Malfunction: The Gauntlet, featuring AC Peters, 100 unfortunates and a stuck virtual reality simulator.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: One of the explanations offered for the origin of Handwavium, but no one knows for sure.
• The Infiltration: Ford Sierra and Cathy in the story Shadowrunning.
• Instant AI, Just Add Handwavium: Any reasonably sophisticated computer system has about a 50-50 chance of spontaneously developing an AI when treated with handwavium; systems designed expressly to house an AI (including androids, gynoids and other robots) almost always generate one.
• Interspecies Romance: Many human/AI parings, most notably Ben and Gina Rhodes. The ones that have been described have been accepted by the Fenspace Convention's society.
• Invisible Aliens: Although impressive artifacts of alien civilizations have been found outside of the solar system, the civilizations themselves have yet to be encountered.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: The Catgirling Machine, a one-way trip.
• Just Following Orders: Many Boskone. A Triax Corporation executive in a forum short story.
• Little Bit Beastly: Most Catgirling Machine victims and some biomods. The much rarer Petting Zoo People are usually deliberate biomods.
• Mad Scientist: The Professor. And many others, but mainly The Professor.
• The Madness Place: Blue Hair Days.
• Magic From Technology: The ultimate goal of both the Wizard and Technomage factions.
• Magical Girl: One of the varieties of Action Girl which inspired the Crystal Millennium, and the signature style of the faction; many in the Crystal Millennium draw their look-and-feel directly from Sailor Moon in particular (although that group's police forces draw more strongly from Silent Moebius).
• Magitek: One of the many explanations offered for Handwavium.
• Mega Crossover: Invoked by the characters of the setting, who structure entire governments based on their respective fandoms.
• Mistress of Disguise: A.C. Peters.
• The Mole: Naoko Sato.
  • In the Fenspace Alternates setting depicted in The South Is Rising (Someone Get A Hammer), Maico Tange and Mohammed Chang.
• Moral Event Horizon: Catgirling a person, any form of forced biomodification. Any form of attack on a person's mind and self.
• Munchkin: Common self-description for some characters.
• Named After Somebody Famous: The Theme Naming for Gagarin-class ships.
• Noodle Incident: The "unfortunate Tennis Ball Incident", mentioned only in the Fenspace Wiki Glossary. It apparently has something to do with the Warsies calling the Grover's Corners "The Death Star", but nothing more is known.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Basically, anything created with handwavium, by necessity.
• "No Warping" Zone: Played straight and inverted. Ships can't go FTL when they're too close to a star -- how close is "too close" varies by the star, with larger, more energetic stars surrounded by larger areas where FTL doesn't work, but the radius is measured in Astronomical Units. Conversely, when ships use handwavium engines outside "the limit," they automatically go FTL.
• Petting Zoo People: Rare, and usually the result of deliberately-planned biomods.
• Russians With Rusting Rockets: The origin of multiple different spacecraft. Including a Shuttle, an Ekranoplan, and a converted Typhoon Ballistic Missile Submarine.
• Ridiculously-Human Robots: Any number of androids and gynoids. A very few of the more advanced models are even capable of reproducing biologically.
• Robot Girl: Noah Scott's "assistants", and roughly 50% of all other AIs.
• Sapient Ship: Any fencraft with an AI. Some individual Fen due to.... oops.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Enthusiastically averted by the collective, who are very aware of the vastness of space and relative smallness of the stuff in it.
• Science Cannot Comprehend Handwavium: While there has been occasional, limited success at reproducing handwaved devices using "hard" technology, the nature, origin and functioning of Handwavium has so far resisted all efforts at investigation and analysis.
  • The one attempt at analyzing handwavium with mage sight was similarly inconclusive.
• Schizo-Tech: Diesel-powered interplanetary ships built from a pre-wave light naval patrol craft, alongside Zeppelins, an SR-71, a ¾-mile-wide worldship, Ancient Aliens, A Russian Space Shuttle, Jet Packs, Hardsuits, Quantum AI and replicas of Apollo-era hardware.
• Shape Shifter: Fenspace has a few true shapeshifters of verious types -- including a Ranma ½-style Gender Bender -- as a result of biomods.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Quite a few after the Boskone conflict.
• Shock and Awe: Minor character Leda Swansen generates electricity, and has been known to use her ability in place of a taser.
• Shout-Out: Imagine, if you will, an entire civilization built on shout-outs.
• Single Phlebotinum Limit: Handwavium, which makes everything possible, is the only substance of its kind known to humanity. (And some say that's more than enough.)
• Sir Swearsalot: Attila Imre of the Grover's Corners.
• Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: Fenspace is probably best described as X-II.
• The Spark of Genius: Appears to be built into handwavium and anything it creates. Entire government agencies exist solely for the purpose of trying to figure out how handwavium-tech does what it does. (Subverting the trope, sometimes they succeed.)
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: If it's listed under this trope, Fenspace almost certainly has an example of it somewhere. About the only type they don't have is a Generation Ship, as they're pretty much unneeded. (So far.)
  • Fightercraft? Lots of'em, especially in the wake of Operation Great Justice.
  • Battleships of all sorts? Same deal.
  • Private yachts? Hell, there are a couple actual sailing ships out there.
  • Worldships? Take a look at the Grover's Corners, a ¾-mile-diameter chunk of West Virginia farmland under a silicon "diamondoid" dome.
• Starship Luxurious: Deliberately invoked with some craft. Deliberately averted with others depending on function.
• Strawman Political: Admittedly, some of the anti-Fen politicians and organizations verge onto this trope.
• Spaceship Girl: A number of main characters began as this trope. Noteworthy is Mel, teenage metalhead avatar of OV-213.
• Superpower Lottery: Biomodification.
• Tannhauser Gate: The first alien artifact discovered by Fen is given this name in deliberate homage to Blade Runner.
• Tempting Fate: Some fans revel in it. Total Information Tactical Awareness Network Integrated Command(T.I.T.A.N.I.C). A Griffon Sportscar. And in the Crossover A Candle in the Dark, the Jumpship Event Horizon is Fenspace first with an upgraded core.
• That's No Moon: Entirely too many things in Fenspace.
  • Deliberately inverted by a member of the Warsie (Star Wars) faction, in regards to the Grover's Corners:

"That's no space space station! That's a moon!"

• Twenty Minutes Into the Future: The action was set in 2012 when the project began in 2006, and has generally stayed ahead of the calendar.
• Urban Legend: Fenspace has already generated its own body of mythology, including Ghost Ships and Big Dumb Objects.
• Used Future: Well, when your first wave of settlers essentially got into space with whatever was handy, including the contents of junkyards...
• We Can Rebuild Him: Emergency cyberisation -- for those for whom biomodification will not work.
• The Wiki Rule: The stories used to be served on a wiki, but they've been moved to Archive of Our Own. Where FenWiki has always excelled is in presenting a substantial amount of supplemental information - which can be seen as a story in itself.
• A Wizard Did It: Substitute "The Overfan" for "A Wizard", and you have one of the schools of thought behind the origin of Handwavium.
• Wizards from Outer Space: The Potterites and the Technomages want to be this. The Whole Fenspace Catalog turns out to have an entire section on magic and the training of mages, making this potentially literal.
• What Have I Become?: Either ironic or not, depending on the situation.
• The Xenophile: Most fen seem to incorporate some degree of this in their personalities, simply by virtue of being Fen. Averted, hard, by the Quatermass Institute.
• Zeerust: A deliberate aesthetic chosen by some factions.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Sometimes a deliberate aesthetic choice, as per Zeerust, and sometimes a serendipitous result of basically building fen civilization out of whatever's handy.