History Literature / Aeon14

* BreakoutCharacter: Sera was originally planned to be the main character and ''Destiny Lost'' the first novel. However, M.D. Cooper found the HumanPopsicle Tanis Richards so compelling that she wrote the ''Intrepid Saga'' trilogy to fill out Tanis's backstory and made her the primary viewpoint character of the main series going forward.

* AIGettingHigh: Sapient AI get a natural high (likened to an orgasm by one character) from great feats of mental prowess. This is deliberately designed into them as a Pavlovian conditioning trigger.

* RapidFTLProliferation: A few decades after the colony ship ''Intrepid'' disappeared into a Time Dilation effect after the events of ''Building Victoria'', experiments with gravity generators led to several groups of scientists near-simultaneously discovering the "dark layer", a plane of spacetime where dark matter has physical form, which allowed the invention of Faster-Than-Light Travel. This turned into several thousand years of interstellar warfare as various star systems previously settled by Human Popsicle colony ships tried to turn themselves into empires.

* HasTwoMommies: Between Tanis, Joe, and Angela, Cary (biological daughter of Tanis and Joe), Saanvi (adopted), and Faleena (AI daughter of Tanis, Joe, and Angela) have a three-parent upbringing, and refer to Tanis and Angela collectively as "Moms".
** In the Aeon 14 ''Building New Canaan'' series by Cooper and JJ Green, planetary engineer Erin and her husband, terraforming biologist Martin and wife, the artist, Isa, and their kids.
** Enhanced human Jessica, her AI wife Iris, their human husband Trevor, and their AI offspring at Star City.

* AmazingTechnicolorPopulation: Sera's morphable artificial skin enables her to change her flesh into a variety of colors from black to light pink. Her default form shows her with deep red skin.

* BarbieDollAnatomy: After Sera gains a morphable polymer skin, she ceases to wear clothes in favor of making use of her newly gained flesh to conceal her bits.

* BreastExpansion: Sera's breasts get an increase in size during her body makeover from Danny when he has a-grav units installed in them.

* DeliberatelyPainfulClothing: A wounded Sera dons one of Rebecca's skinsuits, but it was designed to kill whoever is not the owner, leading to Sera getting tortured nearly to death by it as it tightened itself around her and subjected her to the agonizing pain of it trying to eat her skin from beneath her neck. Helen saved her by reprogramming the suit to bond with her instead, leading to it bonding to what was left of her skin and eventually, with the help of nanobots programmed by Bob, the polymer of the suit became her new morphable artificial skin.

* DiningInTheBuff: When Sera drinks coffee with Jason Andrews in a small dining cabin, she fails to realize that her morphable skin reverted to her being in her default "naked" form with red skin until Jason tells her he is glad her "mode of dress" is the same as it was before she became president. She does not bother fixing it for the duration of their time at the cabin.
* DraconicHumanoid: Sera's makeover from Danny makes her closely resemble a [[DragonsAreDemonic demonic one]] when she gains red scales over most of her body when she morphed her skin at his suggestion, draconic fangs in place of her canines, two thick curled horns sprouting from her forehead, hooved feet, wings, and a tail.

** Cyborgization extends to this in many cases, such as the "mechs" in the ''Rika's Marauders'' series. Built by the Genevian Alliance as {{Super Soldier}}s during their war with the Nietzschean Empire, mechs have their limbs removed and replaced with attachment points for cybernetic limbs and weapons, a BrainComputerInterface installed that includes a RestrainingBolt and a compartment for an AI core, and internal batteries for all their various add-ons (it's noted that some of Rika's c-batts would have to be removed in order for her genitalia to be made usable again). Later models have artificial skin to remove the need to take mechs out of their undersuits for cleaning.

* HornedHumanoid: After attaining her morphable skin, Sera, in addition to being able to grow heels from her feet and recolor and retexture her skin, is capable of growing horns out of her head. When Danny gives her a makeover, her horns are curled.

* NakedPeopleAreFunny: Sera normally has her artificial skin set to provide her with BarbieDollAnatomy unless otherwise specified. However, Fina and Serafina take to messing with the settings as a prank, causing her to sometimes reacquire external genitalia in public--including once in front of Jason Andrews, whom she's become attracted to.

* PleasePutSomeClothesOn: Tanis tries to get Sera to dress up after the latter had the Mark X [=FlowArmor=] merged into her morphable artificial skin against her (Tanis's) wishes. [[DefiedTrope Sera refutes these attempts]], insisting she never wears actual clothing again as well as pointing out to Tanis that she encouraged her to be herself.
* PosthumanNudism: Due to a mishap involving a booby-trapped bodysuit in ''Destiny Lost,'' Sera ends up with a full-body artificial skin, which is morphable. She normally has it set to give her BarbieDollAnatomy below the neck, letting her skip wearing clothes, but in later books of the Orion War series [[spoiler: her clone "sisters" Fina and Serafina]] take to pranking her by messing with the settings, causing her to occasionally reacquire external genitalia in public. (Much to her embarrassment, one of the times it happens is in front of New Canaan Governor Jason Andrews, whom she's developed a crush on.)

* ShapeshifterDefaultForm: Sera's default form after gaining her morphable artificial skin shows her unclothed with deep red flesh.

* TechnicallyNakedShapeshifter: After Sera uses nanotechnology to repair wounds inflicted when she wore a booby-trapped skinsuit, she gains a morphable artificial skin that allows her to generate her own clothes with her default form being a clothless red-skinned woman.

* MookHorrorShow: The page on Wiki/TVTropes has been cited by the author of the short story "Know Thy Enemy", as the story is a POVSequel of the third act of ''Destiny Lost'' from the AST's perspective; the story's concept is largely an exploration of what it feels like for the {{mooks}} that have to fight Tanis Richards. Among other things, we get to see a man be dissolved by a picoswarm ''from his perspective''.

** In ''The Scipio Alliance'', an exclusive resort is patterned after the wreck of the ''Olympic'' (which Angela says is supposed to be the ''Titanic'', and sank in the 20th century rather than the 19th as the advertisers say), while Tanis gets costumed for a masquerade ball as "Shannon" from "''Meteoroid''" (i.e. Samus from ''VideoGame/{{Metroid}}'').

** Crossing over with FutureImperfect, in ''The Scipio Alliance'' Tanis goes to a masquerade ball dressed as "Shannon" from the video game "''Meteoroid''" (i.e. Samus from ''VideoGame/{{Metroid}}'')

** ''Perseus Gate #2: The World at the Edge of Space'': Jessica crashes the stasis-shielded ''Sabrina'' into a planet that's been turned into a gigantic bioweapons laboratory, ramming it all the way ''through'' the planet and out the other side, cracking the crust to the point where magma resurfaces the entire planet in short order. ''[[UpToEleven And they live to tell about it!]]''

** [[spoiler:The spectacular destruction of the gas giant Aurora in ''Destiny Lost''. ''Intrepid'' passes through to refuel and discovers the Bollam's World government has been using orbital graviton generators to keep it from collapsing and becoming a brown dwarf, so that it serves as a helium-3 factory. Trying to destroy ''Intrepid'', an AST fleet blows up the generators, which essentially turns the entire multi-Jupiter-mass planet into a planet-sized thermonuclear bomb. What they ''don't'' expect is that the explosion of the gaseous upper layers ''[[UpToEleven compresses the lower layers into a black hole]]'' and causing complete chaos, not to mention ''Intrepid'' is able to ride the shockwave with its newfangled stasis shields and accelerate to LudicrousSpeed before jumping to FTL.]]

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: The franchise has naturally become this as it has expanded, with each series having its own core group of protagonists.

* AncientConspiracy: The Future Generation Terraformers (FGT) [[spoiler:turns into essentially TheIlluminati [-InSpace-] by ''Destiny Lost'', trying to quietly guide humanity out of the FTL-induced dark ages it fell into]]. {{Lampshaded}} in "Know Thy Enemy": Sini derisively calls them "our friendly neighborhood Illuminati".

* SpaceMarines: ''[[Literature/Aeon14 Aeon 14]]'' abounds with Space Marine esprit de corps. The principle protagonist, Tanis Richards, though originally a Space Navy pilot and captain and then a military intelligence counter-insurgency officer, served with and was beloved by the Marines in both 5th millennium Sol and 9th millennium New Canaan. Exemplified by the speech Marine Sgt. Hector gives when Tanis is captured in ''Race Across Spacetime'':

* CallAHumanAMeatbag: In the Rika books, Rika and other mechs refer to humans as "squishies".

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: The series is somewhere between Mohs/PhysicsPlus and Mohs/OneBigLie. With the exception of stasis fields, FasterThanLightTravel, and ArtificialGravity (the latter two of which are related), most technology is based on present-day theories, all stars are real, and orbital mechanics and TimeDilation provide several major plot points. Technology in the series also advances over time in an organic way. Ascended beings are loosely based on existing theories about higher dimensions of spacetime, and have their limits.

** ''Starfire'' has dialogue stating the cast have seen both ''Franchise/{{Stargate}}'' ("[[Series/StargateSG1 the series]] [[TakeThat was better than]] [[Film/{{Stargate}} the movie]]") and ''Franchise/StarWars'' (there's an extended exchange riffing on a Darth Vader scene).

** [[spoiler:At a higher level, the Transcend/Orion conflict is found to be a proxy war among factions of the ascended AI's at the core, and with other AI powers such as Bob, Airtha, Darla, and The Caretaker. Their "Armageddon" is the heat death of the universe.]]

* CivilWarVersusArmageddon: Most of the series is focused on conflicts between various groups of spacefaring humans, [=AIs=], and both, all of whom have been played off against each other for millennia by ascended [=AIs=] living in the galactic core, who are eventually revealed to have plans that would be apocalyptic for humanity if allowed to succeed. The ''Orion War'' series deals primarily with efforts by the protagonists to forge a coalition out of the morass of warring states to root out the core [=AIs=]' shards and catspaws and take the fight to them--[[spoiler:except it ultimately turns out that the core [=AIs=] aren't wholly unified, either]].
** [[spoiler:At a higher level, the Transcend/Orion conflict is found to be a proxy war among factions of the ascended AI's at the core, and with other AI powers such as Bob, Airtha, Darla, and The Caretaker.]]

* CoolStarship: Just in the first book the ''Intrepid'' is a unique vessel. She's the most advanced colony ship ever built, with onboard farms, forests and game lands, and equipped with a new form of {{ramscoop}} and a virtually godlike shipboard AI named Bob. Over the course of the next few books, the ship is refitted by its crew to be a devastatingly powerful warship as well, culminating in her relaunch in ''New Canaan'' as the ''I2'', which Tanis uses as her flagship during the Orion War. Later, New Canaan begins building several more ''I''-class ships (without a Bob-style AI).