Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, a webcomic by Ralph Hayes, Jr. and a Spin-Off of Tales of the Questor, deals with one of Quentyn's descendants centuries down the track, In Space! Unfortunately updates can be thin on the ground, since Hayes only updates once the donation meter reaches a certain amount - and the meter resets every month.

Tropes used in Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger include:
  • Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Robots and food
  • Alien Non-Interference Clause: There's a law preventing con artists from setting themselves up as gods on more backward planets, and then there's... "Eight million counts of negligent homicide??"
  • Anxiety Dreams
  • Body Horror: One reason why Organic Technology is not more popular.
  • Cool Starship: Both Quentyn's own ship, the Thunderbird, and the Sapphire Star -- a luxury cruise ship with a diameter measured in kilometers.
  • Badass Boast: Page 12
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Two Words: Stellar Lance.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: The Patoodines have a rather unique legal system: they launch criminals from a catapult a distance calculated by adding up the total and severity of your crimes. If you live, you're free to go. But if your crimes are severe enough, they'll launch you at the moon with a rail gun instead.
  • Expy
  • Death World
  • Did Not Do the Research Author Tract: Hayes apparently heard that 3D printers were "like Star Trek replicators" and ran with it. His storyline lauding how 3D printers revolutionized the world and led to Benevolent Libertarian Anarchy or somesuch makes a number of ridiculous and laughable statements. A sampling:
    • It claims that these 3D printers could print gold bricks by filtering gold out of seawater. How did they do this? Did everyone cart their 3D printer down to the coast and hook up a huge hose? What is this filtering doing to the water's chemical makeup? Considering how tiny the amount is, won't the ocean run out of gold by the time the tenth guy pays off his student loans?
    • It eventually has people printing "anti-matter weaponry" with them. Neverminding that someone would still have to design a working raygun that could be 3D printed, how exactly do you load your 3D printer with antimatter? Again, apparently these 3D printers are actually magic and can just make whatever someone asks for.
  • Digital Regulation Is Evil: The RIAA Wars. RH throws an anvil here - his opinion is that we either chill out about it or let the regulators eat our brains - literally. It Makes Perfect Sense - In Context. I invoke Wiki Magic. Read and contribute!
  • Disproportionate Retribution: When the Kvrk-chk ate a Racconan colony ship's passengers, the Empire retaliated by roasting one of the more populated Kvrk-chk star systems with a stellar lance.
  • Fantastic Racism: not so much subverted or inverted as turned completely inside out with the W'naybeans, a race of behavioral and cultural mimics (modeled on the real life Mimic Octopus.) Their habit of imitating not just other races and ethnicities but other race and ethnic STEREOTYPES caused them a great deal of trouble with various easily offended PC types, but eventually they became so ubiquitous that they are routinely employed in various tourist traps preferentially over the very natives they imitate as being "more authentic." The author's point is that "nobody seemed to be too upset as long as it was SOMEBODY ELSE being mimicked..." Ergo, if seen humorously, both racism AND ethnic hypersensitivity are easy to recognize as ridiculous.
  • Famous Last Words: Oops.
  • Force Field Door: Unlike in most common fiction, the Space Rangers have a strict policy concerning Force Field Doors.

Quentyn Quinn: "Ranger Cadet Rule Number One: No matter how shiny the force field is, keep your helmet on 'till the airlock is closed."