Fictional Political Party: Actually, a remarkable number of them – which has a lot to do, I suppose, with the cyberdemocratic/sortitive (random selection) nature of the Imperial Senate and most local assemblies making running a conventional political party a giant exercise in futility; they function mostly as debating societies, influence
Fictional Currency: First, see Global Currency for the most widespread of these: the Imperial esteyn, the Accord exval, the Rim Free Zone’s ergcred, the universal-if-useless gAu, gAg and gPt, the information-currency finality, and so forth. Then there are the Empire’s internal currency (for all practical purposes, sets of
Global Currency: Played straight, twice, and arguably more often. The first of them is the Empire’s esteyn, acceptable everywhere in it and existing in the interests of internal free trade. It’s a quasi-fiat currency, managed by the Imperial Board of Money and Values to avoid either inflationary or
Feudal Future: Subverted. While the runér who make up the “executive branch” of the Empire’s government might look like a feudal hierarchy from some angles, and their titles are occasionally translated that way, in practice they have much less power than a feudal lord’s theoretical powers, and theirs
The Federation: Well, that would be the Voniensa Republic, an essentially conscious Expy of Star Trek‘s Federation. Unfortunately, the Voniensans have to contend with the lack of the scriptwriters on their side; thus, their baseline-fetishism and naturalistic-fallacy-ridden philosophy (“our insert-species-here-anity”), heavy restrictions on personal augmentation (including ephemeralism, because, y’
So. I am, as you know (Bob), a big user of Translation Convention, both within and without universe. (Within, in the sense that when it comes time for the linguists of the Imperial Exploratory Service to build a new translation database when they’re about to contact someone new, they
Fate Worse Than Death: Played essentially straight, rape and torture-wise, given cultural attitudes to slaving and All Things Connected With It. This, of course, became even more the case when death became really hard to inflict (see Final Death); the brain-mounted suicide-switch, often with emergency bug-out transmitter, and a restore
Fast Tunneling: Those hypothetical subterrenes mentioned in the Real Life section of the trope? Yeah. They have those. All those radioactives and, later, fusion reactors means you can afford that kind of energy budget.
Faster Than Light Travel: Means wormholes, which you have to drag to where you want them STL first. (Or, for transmission only, tangle channels – which, for the physicists reading this, do not work by Quantum Entanglement As We Know It.) For more details of which, see Cool Gate, Casual Interstellar
Fantasy Pantheon: Yes, indeed, in the shape of the Triad that emanate from the Flame, their 48 Divine Ministers and Aspects, some divine oddities like the Court of the Seasons, the Court of the Muses, and the Elemental Hexad, and their exarchs (for which read angels, kami, devas, genii loci,
Fantasy Contraception: Full fertility control is built right into the genome of each alpha baseline, and therefore into every clade built on top of that alpha baseline. The male reproductive system does not produce gametes and the female one does not cycle (or their alternate-species equivalents) until instructed otherwise by
Fantastic Slur: Assorted people both outside and unfond of the Empire return this with interest, contributing “shinies” (style with no substance, plus tech-obsession, plus a poke at the unfortunately-timed coinage of “Bright Empire” on a public newscast), “coggies” (part-machine), various where-relevant cultural references to zombies, possession and pod people (reinstantiation,