History Literature / Eldraeverse

* ForScience: The Imperial scientific establishment does recognize the ethical significance of consent. It doesn't recognize the ethical significance of anything else that might stand in the way of SCIENCE!, however. Knowledge and progress are ''eo ipso'' goods and moral imperatives, don't you know, and damn the PotentialApplications!
* GenericanEmpire: The Associated Worlds is a deliberate example, the members being unable to agree on anything less generic.

* HiveMind: The Eldraeic Transcend, although it's very clear that it isn't a hive mind, it's a ''collective consciousness'', or a ''group intellect'', in which everyone retains their own individuality and personality as well as contributing to the whole and it ''certainly'' doesn't treat its constitutionals as drones. It's a coordinating superstructure, not a borganism.
* HumanoidAliens: The eldrae, who are fundamentally hominins, if heavily-and-on-multiple-occasions engineered 7' tall ones with PointyEars. This being relatively hard SF, this means that they are (very) distant cousins of humanity.

* {{Precursors}}: The Eldrae homeworld is riddled with artifacts of their extremely advanced creators.
** The entire homeworld ''is'' a giant Precursor artifact.

With more promised to follow, along with ongoing nanofiction and other articles posted regularly to the author's web site:

http://eldraeverse.com/

* AIIsACrapshoot : Most AIs are fairly safe. ''Seed'' AIs, on the other hand - well, making gods is about as safe as you might expect.

* ArtificialIntelligence : Rather more of it than natural intelligence.

* SpaceOpera: Albeit the "New Space Opera" kind. There's a strong focus on [[MohsScaleOfSciFiHardness hard science]] underpinning the whole thing, but the author seeks to present a vast, expansive, somewhat idealistic AdventureFreeWorld within those constraints.

* SpaceOpera: Albeit the "New Space Opera" kind. There's a strong focus on

* SpaceElves: Baseline eldrae are seven to eight feet tall with pointed ears and don't die of old age. The author's website outright admits it.
* SpaceOpera: Albeit the "New Space Opera" kind. There's a strong focus on
* SpacePeople: About three-fifths of everyone in the modern Empire. Depending on where you draw the line between a habitat that ''is'' an asteroid and a dome that's ''on'' an asteroid.

* ProHumanTranshuman: Not exactly pro-''human'', ''per se'', but the eldrae clearly view self-augmentation

* JustForFun/AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit : The Empire has two Dyson Spheres, one of them solely for power generation, making it a solid Type II.

* AppliedPhlebotinum : Ontotechnology, which as hyper-advanced technology designed to bend the laws of physics on demand is ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin.

* TheBeautifulElite : Thanks to millennia of genetic engineering and other transhuman enhancement, ''all'' the Imperials qualify.
* BlueAndOrangeMorality : Eldrae ethics is incredibly propertarian (considering property metaphysically part of its owner), preoccupied with balance and obligation, worships cold-minded rationality, considers pride a ''virtue'', and is individualist enough to utterly fail to understand why anyone might consider 'peer pressure' or 'community consensus' a thing at all. Naturally, this produces, ah, distinctively inhuman results.
* BlueSkinnedSpaceBabe : While eldrae skin tone most commonly varies between cream and copper, there is a small minority with skin translucent enough to qualify here. Having blue blood, and all.

* CasualInterstellarTravel : Eventually - the stargates do give you this, but getting them emplaced in the first place is anything but casual.

* DeusEstMachina : Seed AIs in general. With a special nod here to the Eldraeic Transcend, which not only concluded that wearing the existing mythological pantheon as a hat made for a good user interface, but may actually have been responsible for creating the myths in the first place, millennia before it was built.

* TheFederation : A darkly shaded version; the Voniensa Republic, which resembles the United Federation of Planets viewed through very cynical eyes, although more good intentions GoneHorriblyWrong than a PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny.

* ForScience : The Imperial scientific establishment does recognize the ethical significance of consent. It doesn't recognize the ethical significance of anything else that might stand in the way of SCIENCE!, however. Knowledge and progress are ''eo ipso'' goods and moral imperatives, don't you know, and damn the PotentialApplications !
* GenericanEmpire : The Associated Worlds is a deliberate example, the members being unable to agree on anything less generic.

* HegemonicEmpire : The Empire of the Star, having decided a very long time ago that traditional empire-building only worked well when you could persuade people that they ''wanted'' to be Imperials, and if you could do that successfully, then conquering them was pretty much superfluous.
* HiveMind : The Eldraeic Transcend, although it's very clear that it isn't a hive mind, it's a ''collective consciousness'', or a ''group intellect'', in which everyone retains their own individuality and personality as well as contributing to the whole and it ''certainly'' doesn't treat its constitutionals as drones. It's a coordinating superstructure, not a borganism.
* HumanoidAliens : The eldrae, who are fundamentally hominins, if heavily-and-on-multiple-occasions engineered 7' tall ones with PointyEars. This being relatively hard SF, this means that they are (very) distant cousins of humanity.

* {{Immortality}} : The eldrae and galari are TheAgeless, naturally, and with the help of {{Transhuman}} engineering, just about everyone can have a BodyBackupDrive, via BrainUploading. They're working hard on selling both of these to everyone else in the universe, too.
* InsignificantLittleBluePlanet : Earth isn't even ''known'' to the universe, although it's out there somewhere.
* JustAMachine : Averted. Very strongly. Usually with railguns.
* KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter : For the most part, yes. Energy weapons do exist, for various specialized purposes, but the majority of guns from handgun to ortillery sized are kinetic MagneticWeapons.
* LibertyOverProsperity : Mostly averted; the cashy money tends to belong to the LibertariansInSpace - but not ''all'' the examples of LibertariansInSpace.
* MatterReplicator : The ubiquitous - in the Empire and other bits of the Core Economic Zone - nanoforge, cornucopia machine, and/or autofac, which use [[NanoMachines nanofabrication]] mixed with automated versions of traditional manufacturing techniques to make just about anything that can be made out of traditional matter that you have a recipe for. And unless it's still under copyright, for not much more than the cost of the raw materials and the energy input.
* MindHive : Most people qualify as a mild form of this, as running a personal assistant AI ("muse") on the computer in your head is commonplace, as is letting it run your body while you're busy elsewhere. And constitutionals of the Eldraeic Transcend have its soul-shard running in their head, too.
* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness : Self-described as "firm" SF, aiming for around 4 (OneBigLie) on the scale, and has received the [[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval.php#id--Science_Fiction_Novels--Vignettes_of_the_Star_Empire Atomic Rockets seal of approval]], which the author takes as a good sign.
* NoPoverty : Played straight in the Empire and other bits of the Core Economic Zone, thanks to the MatterReplicator and ensuing post-material-scarcity. Taken remarkably casually, too, because so far as most people living there are concerned, it ''is'' the natural state of affairs. Scarcity economies are the weird, unnatural things.
* OneNationUnderCopyright : The reason that the Empire's citizens are referred to as citizen-shareholders. Back in the dim and distant past, it grew out of a merger of anarchist-style private law providers (a PrivatelyOwnedSociety).
* OrionDrive : Most of the Empire's original space program was powered by Orion drives - the desert they launched from is still glowing - and they're still a popular design choice. Played even harder by the ''Flapjack''-class DropShip, which is a ''double-ended'' OrionDrive one end of which doubles as a nuclear daisy-cutter.

* PiecesOfGod : Non-supernatural example; the Empire's local DeusEstMachina is built on top of the local HiveMind, and so every one of the Transcend's constitutionals is arguably one of its subroutines.

* RaygunGothic : The default Imperial aesthetic, with just a hint of CrystalSpiresAndTogas.
* ScaleOfScientificSins : Absolutely all of them. The Imperial research establishment considers this sort of thing a to-do list.
* ScienceIsBad : Believed by a few minority factions to one degree or another; widely and publicly mocked by everyone else. The Empire, in particular, has lots of people willing to sneer "bigoted, barbaric, knowledge-resenting, knuckle-dragging primitives", etc., etc., with only a moment's provocation.

* SpaceElves : Baseline eldrae are seven to eight feet tall with pointed ears and don't die of old age. The author's website outright admits it.
* SpaceOpera : Albeit the "New Space Opera" kind.
* SpacePeople : About three-fifths of everyone in the modern Empire. Depending on where you draw the line between a habitat that ''is'' an asteroid and a dome that's ''on'' an asteroid.

* {{Telepathy}} : Technically, no. Organic wireless networking, on the other hand...

* UpliftedAnimal : In several varieties, most prominently the ''dar-bandal'' - uplifted canines, but also mentioned are cetaceans, corvids, octopodes, rat swarms (rather than individual rats), and at least one outright alien species.
* {{Utopia}} : The Empire tries hard to be one, or at least an asymptotic approach to one, but is quite self-aware about being a Utopia for the sort of people who think the way that Imperials think people ought to think, and less so for people who don't.
* WorldBuilding : Lots of it, with quite a few explanatory articles mixed in with the fiction on the author's blog. Also an example of SugarWiki/TVTropesWillEnhanceYourLife, as this site is used extensively as a world-building tool in the [[http://eldraeverse.com/category/worldbuilding/trope-a-day/ trope-a-day series]].

* SpaceElves : The eldrae, just as the author's website subtitle implies.

The Eldraeverse is a {{Transhuman}} SpaceOpera setting rooted in [[Mohs/OneBigLie Hard]] ScienceFiction, developed by Alistair Young. It currently comprises one book of short/nanofiction:

* {{Precursors}}: The Eldrae homeworld is riddled with artifacts of their extremely advanced ancestors.

* UpliftedAnimal : In several varieties, most prominently the ''dar-bandal'' - uplifted canines.

* PrivatelyOwnedSociety : The reason that the Empire's citizens are referred to as citizen-shareholders. Back in the dim and distant past, it grew out of a merger of anarchist-style private law providers.

* MindHive : Most people qualify as a mild form of this, as running a personal assistant AI ("muse") on the computer in your head is commonplace, as is letting it run your body while you're busy elsewhere.