shiny

Trope-a-Day: Used Future

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(As a side note, please permit me to apologize for the lack of new fic content over the last few days. I appear to have once again contracted some sort of death plague that is playing merry hell with my creativity, so I’m just sitting around crunching numbers, popping excedrin, and playing video games. Normal operation will be resumed as soon as I can operate normally.)

Used Future: Averted in the Empire – as you can probably tell by the way we hit up Crystal Spires and Togas, Everything is an iPod in the Future and Raygun Gothic on the way here, not to mention Scenery Porn, the Empire sits hard on the shiny side of the Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty.  Note: it’s not necessarily new; some of it’s just been lovingly maintained for millennia and polished every morning until it gleams.  Even more so with robotics and nanotechnology and post-scarcity energy supplies that fervently and with zeal ensure that all litter is picked up, all spills vanished, all nicks and dings repaired, and everything maintained in a state of appalling just-off-the-production-line perfection at all times!  Even the garbage trucks are gorgeous!

The metaphorical appearance of the actuality may best be compared to the perfect streets and shiny happy people seen mostly in architect’s impressions and Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets.

How used everyone else’s future is tends to depend on location: see Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty for this, and Shiny Looking Spaceships for one way this trope plays out in practice.

Trope-a-Day: Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty

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Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty: In general, the Empire and the Photonic Network hit shiny the hardest of anything, in the former’s case for ideological reasons combined with the fact that decaying things just drive them nuts.  Everything is shiny, polished, gleaming, and in perfect working order… including the utility tunnels.

The Voniensans are shiny and polished – at least in the bits they let people see – but in more of a plasticky, ST:TNG way, since they’re less willing to let the high technologies right off the leash.  The other Great Powers work on keeping up with these two, and then things get progressively grittier as you move down through lesser powers’ core words (with some situational exceptions – the Free Eilish Confederacy is stinkin’ rich and doesn’t mind showing it, for example), down through poorer colonies, until you end up in underfunded Cult Colonies and Wretched Hives like Nepscia.  These latter examples can get pretty damn gritty.