Not Quite SHODAN is a long-running Star Trek fanfiction series by the author Hiver. Written in first-person, it follows the life of a sophontic AI in the United Federation of Planets. Originally following the AI known as Winter, and then Star, in recent stories the perspective has switched to the original character's fork, known originally as Stella, then Andromeda, then Ivy.
The original story can be found at SpaceBattles.com here
. The sequels are Dreams of Starfire, Broken Dreams, Starseeker, Duality, Paradise Lost, Division, Rifts, and Questions of Honor, and The First Duty. There is also a side story set in the same universe, 'The Tale of the USS Fluffy Bunny', in this thread.
Tropes:
- Abandon Ship: When Star gets damaged during the Federation-Romulan war, she tells her crew to abandon her hull while she holds off the Romulan ships. Oddly enough, while her hull is damaged beyond repair, she survives and is rescued later.
- Ace Pilot: All AI are technically this, as they control the ship directly, and can think a hundred times faster than a human.
- Action Girl
- Adaptation Deviation: An odd slightly-meta version. The events of the Franchise are merely in-universe holo-novels, so while the basics are mostly the same, anything that would not be known to the public is fiction.
- Adrenaline Time: All A.I.s have the ability to modify the speed at which they perceive time, up to one hundred times faster than a human.
- After-Action Patch-Up: Star's, and later Ivy's ship bodies have to be repaired after any battle.
- Against My Religion: Artificial Intelligence goes against the Goddesses of the Hrrlians. To be fair, they have reasons for it.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted with Star and her forks.
- Played painfully straight with the Berserkers.
- A Mother To Her Crew
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Very odd example. After following the same protagonist through 8 different books, the ninth suddenly features a different fork of the main character, who we have never met before.
- Artificial Intelligence: The viewpoint character(s).
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Due to an AI's speed and multitasking capability, they can look over sensor data and make deductions in microseconds, as seen during the first chapter of 'Questions of Honour', where the LOU 'A Sudden Sinking Feeling' deduces the location of a Berserker and kills it without ever being spotted just by seeing a minor gravitational anomaly.
- Call Back: Too many to count, most of them minor.
- Chekhov's Gun: The author loves these.
- The Romulan ship sending a distress signal in the second book turns out to be the first clue of the existence (and temperament) of the Berserkers.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Cascading neural network failure starts with the AI affected making tiny mistakes in calculation and thinking slower, but then quickly makes them go insane, possibly killing or destroying everything around them before dying. The worst part of this is that it's caused by a manufacturing fault in the AI's quantum core, making it inevitable if the faulty core gets through the inspection process.
- Curbstomp Battle: The second Borg invasion attempt. A single Borg Cube is incinerated by the entirety of Star Fleet.
- Did Not Get the Girl: Early on, Star and Sarah.
- Elite Army: AI-controlled ships. Didn't help the against the Berserkers, though.
- Embarrassing Nickname: The USS Enterprise, also known as Princess.
- Enemy Mine: Mentioned. Star would be willing to team up with the Borg against the Berserkers.
- Evil Counterpart: A large part of the series revolves around the Berserkers being this to the main protagonists.
- Exotic Extended Marriage: One of Star's friends is Caitian, with multiple wives. Ivy forks in order to become one of his wives, while staying with her hull and captain simultaneously.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Odd example during the start of the series. The (then-unnamed) main character begins life as a self-evolving AI inside a heavily modified approximation of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as it is easier to simulate. They adjust relatively quickly, and this ceases being a part of the plot after that first book.
- Call-Back: The main character's origins are still occasionally mentioned, and in one case allow Ivy to be sympathetic to a teenage boy found in a capsule after being frozen since 1993.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: Chapter 15 of Rifts is from the point of view of the captain of the Plan B.
- Future Imperfect: An odd example: Our reality is a simulation based on the surviving knowledge of the setting's 20th Century, combined with some elements intended to give a basic primer on the real world. For instance, Star Trek.
- Gender Bender: Very unusual example: the (initially male, at least mentally) main character, taking the role of a ship's main AI, is considered to be the avatar of the ship itself at his own behest. Since ships in the setting are considered feminine, as per tradition, the main character is progressively referred to as female, until they give in and adopt a more feminine voice and avatar.
- Godzilla Threshold: The last Borg attack, demanding the use of Plan B's Subspace weapon.
- Go Through Me: Star when defending her crew from the Romulans.
- Human Popsicle: Luke.
- Klingon Promotion: Synan is offered the position of head of the Klingon Council after killing the previous leader in hand-to-hand combat. She declines.
- Major Injury Underreaction: Ivy's spine is bent almost half a degree after the latest Borg invasion. Her sensors are so damaged she doesn't even notice, despite the very real possibility of folding herself in half from the strain of cruising back to port.
- My Greatest Failure: For any ship, losing their crew. Jovians value the lives of their crew above all else, and any crewmembers killed under their command are seen as personal failures. Losing their entire crew would permanently scar a ship.
- Negative Space Wedgie: Referenced multiple times.
- Star accidentally enters one leading to the past of an alternate timeline. One of her runabouts, Eclipse Phase, intentionally collapses it later from the wrong side after the ship gets back.
- Red Herring: Several, made even worse by the author's love of Chekhov's Guns.
- Take That!: Star Trek: Voyager is a series of in-universe Cult Holonovels written by a bored Junior Officer Janeway. Most of the episodes are taken from fanfiction.
- Villain Decay: The Borg, who destroyed most of Starfleet in their first appearance in this series, but were destroyed without casualties by the second. Their third appearance was somewhere in between.
