Fenspace

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.

Fenspace is a collective writing project based on Bob Schroeck's Drunkard's Walk Forums, and is supported by both a wiki and a story archive.

Unmarked spoilers below.


 * 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: Very much not our timeline, 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 branching or divergent timelines, 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.
 * Briefcase Blaster: Noah Scott using a Real Life example in Legend of the 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 away 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 Pinaore, 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.
 * Crystal Spires and Togas: The Crystal Cities and Ohtori-style architecture.
 * 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.
 * 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. Exactly 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 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.
 * Gender Bender: Common -- and occasionally intentional -- result of handwavium biomodification.
 * Gone Horribly Wrong: An occasional result of a Blue Hair Day.
 * Gone Horribly Right: The other occasional result of a Blue Hair Day.
 * 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 strip (and other forms of) mining; this was realized only after environmentalists 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 almost always generate one.
 * 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.
 * Just Following Orders: Many Boskone. A Triax Corporation executive in a forum short story.
 * 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 Wizards and Technomages factions.
 * Magical Girl: One of the varieties of Action Girl which inspired the Crystal Millenium, and the signature style of the faction; the Crystal Millennium's paramilitary forces draw their look-and-feel directly from Sailor Moon in particular.
 * 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.
 * No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Basically, anything created with handwavium, by necessity.
 * Ridiculously-Human Robots: Any number of androids and gynoids. Some 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.
 * Schizo-Tech Diesel-powered interplanetary ships built from a pre-wave light naval patrol craft, alongside Zeppelins, an SR-71, Quantum AI and replicas of Apollo-era hardware.
 * 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.
 * Shell-Shocked Veteran: Quite a few after the Boskone conflict.
 * Shout-Out: Imagine, if you will, an entire civilization built on shout-outs.
 * 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.
 * Tempting Fate: No prizes for guessing exactly how Mackie Jaguar's Griffon gas turbine car malfunctions.
 * 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: Well, the stories themselves are served on a wiki, but there's a lot of supplemental information there too.
 * 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.
 * 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.