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.

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: 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.
 * Applied Phlebotinium : 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.
 * Beast Folk: A common result of Biomodification.  Most prominent are the catgirls/boys and the bunnyfolk.
 * 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 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.
 * 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.
 * 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 worlds 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.
 * 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.
 * Hand Wave: Source of the name "handwavium".
 * Hollywood Cyborg A.C. Peters, Jet Jaguar, The Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Far too many example to count.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Robot Girl: Noah Scott's "assistants", and roughly 50% of all other AIs.
 * 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.
 * Strawman Political: Admittedly, some of the anti-Fen politicians and organizations verge onto this trope.
 * Superpower Lottery: Biomodification.
 * 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.
 * Used Future: Well, when your first wave of settlers essentially got into space with whatever was handy, including the contents of junkyards...
 * 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.