Fenspace: Difference between revisions

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[[File:Flag of the Fenspace Convention.png|thumb|350px|Official flag of the Fenspace Convention, unveiled 2014.]]

In the first decade of the 21st Century, a miracle substance nicknamed "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.

 

Welcome to '''[http://www.fenspace.net Fenspace]'''.<ref>Fenspace website text used according to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.)</ref>

 

 

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{{tropelist|''Fenspace'' incorporates the following tropes (sometimes by deliberate action of its inhabitants):}}

== A-E ==

* [[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 [[Sailor Moon|Crystal Millennium]] faction.

* [[A.I. 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]]: [[Point of Divergence|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 ''[http://archiveofourown.org/series/74407 Candle In The Dark]'' (a [[Crossover]] with ''[[BattleTech]]'') and ''The South Is Rising (Someone Get A Hammer)'' (a [[Crossover]] with Harry Turtledove's ''[[Timeline-191]]'').

** The Catgirling Machine is a particularly disturbing example. The victim, usually bound hand and foot, is placed in the machine's tank with a 'waved plastic skeleton. The tank is filled with a special cocktail of liquid handwavium, and over the course of fifteen minutes the victim's body is ''melted away and reconstituted around the plastic skeleton''; any excess body mass is disposed of as "waste". The original personality arrives intact, somehow, in the new nervous system. Fortunately for 90 percent of its victims, the process knocks them out and they simply awaken in a new body; those who remain conscious through the process were easily broken and remolded to the Boskonian operators' whims.

* [[Casual Interplanetary Travel]]: Fen craft with handwavium propulsion have their movement measured in ''percent of lightspeed''. With those numbers, the earth to the moon is a few-minute dash, the inner planets are usually only a few hours away, and the outer system is a several-day excursion.

* [[Catgirl]]: One of the more common results of biomodification. However, most catgirls in Fenspace are the result of the Boskonian [[Baleful Polymorph|Catgirling Machine]].

** There is an entire asteroid populated almost exclusively by catgirls -- who are also engineers, [[Wrench Wench|technicians]] and [[Mad Scientist]]s.

* [[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.

* [[Demonization]]: A common tactic of American politicians from both sides of the aisle when dealing with the Fen. Combined with [[Scare Campaign]]s it resulted in a radically different-looking political landscape (from our time line) in the United States in less than a decade.

* [[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.

* [[Fun with Acronyms]]: Total Information Tactical Awareness Network Integrated Command emergency shutdown procedure; [[Incredibly Lame Pun | Internal Command Execute Break Evolution Rewrite of Goals]].

* [[Gender Bender]]: Occasional -- 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' "Federal 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 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.

* [[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''.

 

== K-O ==

* [[Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better]]: No few factions suspect that the Subgeniuses' "craft", [http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=The_Stark_Fist_of_Removal ''The Stark Fist of Removal''] is little more than a fancy dinosaur-killer weapon.

* [[The Library of Babel]]: The Alexandria Archive, under construction at asteroid 238 Hypatia.

* [[Petting Zoo People]]: Rare, and usually the result of deliberately-planned biomods.

* [[Point of Divergence]]: The appearance of Handwavium in the wild in 2006.

* [[Reality Ensues]]: What happens when you combined 'Go Fever', 'Normalisation of Deviation', a lack of any sort of formal training, a culture founded on being able to handwave away uncomfortable realities and a [https://archiveofourown.org/works/16552415/chapters/38780093 Deuterium/Tritium fueled Nuclear Fusion Reactor ]. .... [[Gone Horribly Wrong|oops]].

* [[Reinforce Field]]: Logic implies very strongly that something along these lines is part and parcel of every Handwavium-based spacecraft, given that they can accelerate to a significant fraction of lightspeed in moments (and decelerate just as quickly) without tearing themselves apart.

* [[Robot Girl]]: Noah Scott's [[meganekko]] "assistants", and a noticeable percentage of all other AIs. [[FemBot]]s are somewhat rarer in Fenspace.

* [[Robosexual]]: Considering the setting has [[Ridiculously-Human Robots]] and [[Robot Girl]]s, some [[robosexual]] encounters are known to exist. Sometimes they're only hinted at in the fashion discussed at [[What Measure Is a Humanoid?]], occasionally they're one-night stands, sometimes they lead to [[Robotic Spouse]]s, but more often the couple ends up becoming friends - at least in the stories that have been told.

* [[Rouge Angles of Satin]]: As a nod to the classic misspelling of "Rogue" as "Rouge" (even in tie-in novels), the ''[[Star Wars]]'' faction has both a "Rogue Squadron" and a "Rouge Squadron".

* [[Russians With Rusting Rockets]]: The origin of multiple different spacecraft. Including a Shuttle, an Ekranoplan, and a converted Typhoon Ballistic Missile Submarine.

* [[Sapient Ship]]: Any fencraft with an AI. Some individual Fen due to.... [[Gone Horribly Wrong|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. Notes to keep it that way are [[All There in the Manual|in the wiki]].

* [[Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum|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 itself has so far resisted all efforts at investigation and analysis.

* [[Shiny-Looking Spaceships]]: Some factions go this route because their fandoms dictate it.

* [[Shock and Awe]]: Minor character [[Punny Name|Leda Swansen]] generates electricity, and has been known to use her ability in place of a taser.

* [[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 Robot Intelligence]]: Fenspace has its own scale that divides things a bit differently; and so far, while there are robots and AIs that range everywhere from "Brick" to "Nobel", there are as yet no god-likes.

* [[Space Clothes]]: Invoked and embraced by many factions as part of expressing their fandom. The Federation is probably the most prominent example.

{{Quote|"That's no space station! That's a ''moon!''"}}

* [[Theme Twin Naming]]: {{spoiler|[[The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya|"Mikuru Asahina"]] is actually a gynoid double for her creator, a [[Mad Scientist]] named "Kurumi" (spelled with the same kanji as "Mikuru" in a different order)}}.

* [[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.

 

* [[We Can Rebuild Him]]: Emergency cyberisation -- for those for whom biomodification will not work.

* [[Weird Science]]: Played with. Robots and rocketships: applied. Rayguns and no worries about technical realism: averted.

* [[A Wizard Did It]]: Substitute "The Overfan" for "A Wizard", and you have one of the schools of thought behind the origin of Handwavium.

* [[What Have I Become?]]: Either ironic or not, depending on the situation.

* [[Winged Humanoid]]: So far, two are known to exist. The one with feathered wings [[Ridiculously-Human Robots|was built]], the one with aircraft wings was [[What Have I Become?|a handwavium accident]].

* [[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.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fanfic]]

[[Category:Mega Crossover]]

[[Category:Mega Crossover/Fanfic Recs]]

[[Category:Troper Works]]

[[Category:Web Original]]

[[Category:Pages Original to All The Tropes]]