Web Original / The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy

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The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy is a science fiction sendoff to Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, published in 2001 on the blog Rocketpunk Manifesto by Rick Robinson.

Like the book that it is based on, the Guide is a tongue-in-cheek parody of the science fiction genre's various idiosyncrasies and recurring elements. It also makes note, where applicable, of historic changes in these elements, as the modern science fiction genre is somewhat older than post-Tolkienian adventure fantasy — the Golden Age of Science Fiction peaked in the forties after the Pulp age of the 20s and 30s, while modern fantasy fiction mostly came into its own in the sixties — which means that many of the signposts of the genre have had time to develop more noticeable changes over the years.

The Guide can be read here. Archive link, in case the server goes down again

Examples:

• Artificial Gravity: Antigravity and artificial gravity were mainstays of early science fiction, but have mostly faded in popularity due to requiring a little too much handwaving to sit well with suspension of disbelief. The kind of artificial gravity that lets people walk around on starships is still popular for convenience's sake.
• Asteroid Miners: Asteroid mining is a common profession, and is mostly filled by eager prospector types who are certain that they'll hit the mother lode on the next rock they scout and gather together in rowdy space bars. It's a rather better deal than planetside mining, which seems to mostly be done by overworked, underpaid (if at all paid) peons who live in terror of their shift bosses and/or slave overseers. Asteroid mining is mostly justified under the premise that doing all your heavy industry in space and then shipping finished goods over to planets is cheaper than having to haul stuff up and down gravity wells all the time, although a civilization with Casual Interstellar Travel might be expected to have found workarounds to these issues after a while.
• The Cycle of Empires: Galactic civilization tends to go through this process at least once. The First Empire is formed at some point, spreads and flourishes, and it is good. Eventually, it runs into problems — the specifics tend to depend on the author's personal peeves, but often it will fall under the strain of political corruption and decadence as the ruling caste get too used to the good life and forget their virtues, or else the government chokes it to death with taxes or overreach, or else the rich and powerful cripple it for their own gain while the poor are left to starve, or else it overextends past its ability to control its subject worlds. People may try to stave off the end, but inevitably the Empire falls apart and the galaxy is left in a long, dark Interregnum where each world must fend for itself and many planets will regress in technology, sometimes to the stone age. Eventually, a Second Empire will be formed to reunify the galaxy that will correct and avoid the faults of the First. Hopefully.
• Dead Horse Trope: Discussed. The Guide notes that several tropes that were popular in Pulp or Golden Age science fiction have declined in popularity in modern stories for a number of reasons, such as the prevalence of robots and AI — the lackluster development of real-life AI hurt its popularity in hard science fiction — or a Solar System rich in artificial space stations — this trope was originally popularized as a form of space homesteading, which ran into the issue that it's very difficult to have your personal self-sufficient homestead on an orbital where everything relies on cooperation, resource sharing, and the maintenance crews being able to go everywhere.
• Deflector Shields: Shields — also called screens or deflectors — are a common sort of technobabble for all-but-impenetrable force fields that protect a ship from harm. They've fallen somewhat out of favor outside of soft science fiction because they're difficult to justify without a lot of handwaving, although magnetic fields that disrupt energy or plasma-based weapons but do little against kinetic ones still see use. Mostly they've been replaced by alternative defense systems, such as point-defense lasers, clouds of dust to absorb energy weapons, or regular material armor.
• Energy Weapon: Beams, which fire either concentrated energy or energized particle beams, are a mainstay of science fiction combat, and usually much nimbler and more efficient than real lasers.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: FTL is something of a necessary handwavium in science fiction — it's almost impossible to give a coherent explanation for how it works, but it's just as difficult to have an interstellar story without it; for all the bells and whistles that it's given, it still amounts to what's basically magic. As a result, writers usually have to resort to shuffling the whole thing a little out of sight and just not addressing it in detail. It has had numerous varieties and nomenclatures, but mostly falls into the kind that lets you "fly" to where you're going, which allows maneuvering and faster-than-light battles and which usually comes with sleek, "aero"dynamic designs, and the kind that lets you instantly "jump" to where you're going, which often relies on preexisting jump points to work, and where the ship is entirely reliant on the natural course of the "jump" for direction. Jump FTL tends to be more popular in modern fiction, partly because it's easier to handwave using wormholes and partly because it's less narratively intrusive.
  So far as genuine scientific plausibility goes, a ship's FTL Drive might just as well be a pretty woman in a white dress who lights some candles and flips tarot cards while chanting in Welsh.
• The Federation: A common type of Galactic Superpower, which typically consists of individual planetary governments voluntarily associating and retaining some degree of internal autonomy.
• Feudal Future: During the Interregnum, the collapse of galactic civilization seems to cause a lot of newly-isolated planets to revert to the days of castles, knights and dukes once their technology is lost. Even in space, however, great Empires still tend to be run along lines of aristocracy and noble families. Theocratic Neomedievalists are a variant ruled by their church, where most of the peasantry lives in terror of God and the clerics.
• Food Pills: Early science fiction tended to depict all forms of food as either pills or, later, slops processed from algae or made in replicators. Modern works seem to have largely done away with this in favor of real and more appetizing fare.
• Galactic Superpower: The known galaxy is usually ruled by a single giant Empire, which may be a literal empire or some sort of federation or republican government. If Earth is present, it will usually be centered on it. Usually the first Empire will fall into decadence or corruption, collapse, and produce a long dark age as each world is left to fend for itself until the Second Empire can reunify the galaxy.
• Generation Ships: One of the two main kinds of Slowboat, where people deal with the extreme length of slower-than-light travel by building what's basically a space station with a drive and forming a stable community that will live within the ship for however many generations it takes to get to where they're going. These ships have a marked tendency for their crews to completely forget their mission once enough time has passed.
  It often happens that, after a few centuries en route, the inhabitants of a Generation Ship completely forget where they came from, much less where they're going.
• MegaCorp: The Active variant of Trade Federations tends to function more like a loose web of commercial interests, companies, and trading vessels than anything, often not even owning land on planets and instead basing itself entirely on space stations and starships.
• Hand Wave: Referred to as Handwavium, this is the tendency for writers to pull materials or technologies with all sorts of amazing, narratively convenient, and poorly explained properties out of thin air. Science fiction writers and readers don't love doing this as a rule, but the one technology that interstellar science fiction can't do without, faster-than-light travel, is by all appearances flatly impossible unless you resort to pure Handwavium to cover up the issue.
• Hive Mind: Hive Entities are Really Alien species that seem to operate with a single will. They range from more or less ordinary eusocial species to truly networked swarms, either controlled by a "brain" caste or networked like neurons in a brain through some means that won't be fully explained. In any case, individuals will count for nothing and dialogue, trade, or diplomacy with independent sapients is basically impossible. In most appearances they're mindlessly hostile and attack in huge waves, putting as little value on their own clockwork lives as on those of the enemy, and tend to act as metaphors for the dangers of totalitarianism and counterpoints to the value of individual thought. Robinson notes that this is something of a pity, as hive minded species are a rather interesting concept, and if the mind is collectively intelligent then it must logically have some kind of ideas and views of its own, however difficult they might be to communicate. He also wonders if, given the sheer physical scale of these swarms, their equivalent of brain functions must also be significantly slower than our own, taking weeks to compute thoughts that we do in moments, which might explain their seemingly mindless hostility as their equivalent of reflex actions.
• Intrepid Merchant: Free Traders are independent-minded, swaggering, buccaneering sorts who ply the stars in their ships to seek trade and profit. They often have their own distinct and clannish society, tend to turn to smuggling to shore up profits, and usually have very well-armed ships as insurance against the risks of their job.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Kinetic weaponry has made a resurgence in modern science fiction, largely because while it's less flashy than energy or particle weapons it's easier to explain and can get quite powerful in its own right. On a personal combat scale, railguns have gotten quite popular. On a ship-to-ship scale, if you can get a physical object to accelerate to a few hundred thousand miles per second — which to a civilization capable of getting ships to go faster than light presumably isn't out of the realm of possibility — then even a throw pillow or a carton of milk will hit with the force of thousands of times its mass in TNT. A fleeing ship going at light or overlight speeds can even just scatter shrapnel behind itself and let its pursuer run into it and vaporize itself that way.
  Simple, cheap, nasty — what more can you ask of a space weapon?
• Libertarians IN SPACE!: Discussed and deconstructed. Robinson notes in the entry on Habitats that, especially in the 70s, they became very popular among libertarian writers as a way to create ideal free societies in space. However, space habitats require an immense degree of organization and cooperation in order to remain viable as a place where people can live, which contributed to the decline in popularity of this setting element.
  A Habitat as a whole might be independent, but the same ecological factors that make it expensive also require pretty tight social regulation. In a Habitat, you don't tell the guy who checks pressure leaks to get the hell off your property. So much for libertarianism.
• Magnetic Weapons: Railguns and coilguns — science fiction uses the terms somewhat interchangeably — are kinetic weapons that use electric or magnetic motors to accelerate metallic slugs to extreme speeds. They also have some civilian applications, as big magnetic guns have some popularity as means of throwing cargo around planetary systems.
• Naming Your Colony World: Several systems are discussed:
  • In Pulp age science fiction, the usual method was to pick a familiar star — Sirius, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran — and append a Roman numeral to it to signify how many planets the inhabited world is from the star. This ran into issues when it was discovered that most near-Sun stars are short-lived red giants and extremely unlikely to have habitable worlds.
  • This prompted a shift towards making up fictional stars in the Golden Age, implicitly more distant Sun-like yellow suns, to put before the Roman numbers. These were mostly references to Classical or Norse mythology. Everyday language tends to drop the numeral, under the assumption that each star only has the one livable world.
  • The 70s saw a shift towards more culturally varied names, alongside flippant and sarcastic ones like "Big Gulch" for a planet with a large canyon.
• Numbered Homeworld: Most fictional planets tend to be named with a [Star Name] [Roman Numeral] system, numeral optional in casual conversation, to mark how many orbits out the planet is from the star. Robinson notes that NASA also uses a number system... but, because astronomers have no way to know how many other planets a star has when a new one is discovered, these numbers have no relation to orbit count and also tend to use modern numerals instead.
• Orbital Bombardment: The practice of bombarding a planet until its surface is an uninhabitable mass of molten rock is referred to as "Slagging" it. Given the relative ease of at least just towing an asteroid into a planet compared to the frequency of all-out interstellar space warfare, Robinson assumes that galactic war works under an unspoken agreement to fight only a l'outrance, without resorting to the truly nasty weapons.
  Violators, one must presume, get Slagged.
• Planet Terra: "Terra" is the classic name used for Earth in science fiction, partly because "Earthian Empire" sounds ridiculous. "Tellus/Tellurian" and "Sol/Solarian" are uncommon alternatives. Recent science fiction has tended to go back towards using "Earth", although the issue of lackluster possessive forms is still open.
• Plasma Cannon: Plasma weapons tend to fire ball-like projectiles something like artificial ball lightning, contained in a magnetic field that collapses when it hits something and allows the stored plasma to violently vent its energy on its surroundings.
• Private Military Contractors: Mercenaries are fairly common out in space; most seem to specialize in planetside engagements. Paid soldiers are usually the main force fielded by interstellar megacorps. For others, hiring mercs is a chancy prospect, as they're rarely inclined to die before they can spend their money and have a tendency to turn on their employers. Theocratic Neomedievalists tend to go in for mercenary professions, but, as the Guide drily notes, "anyone who hires religious fanatics to do their fighting for them deserves the consequences".
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: "Aliens with Forehead Ridges" are one of the two main types of aliens. They're basically like humans except for unusual forehead ridges, or pointed ears, or some other minor thing. They're also culturally very similar to humans, although each species will usually have only one culture to go around. They tend to raise awkward questions concerning evolution, which in modern fiction makes them rare outside of Hollywood-style soft science fiction. The main advantage of including them, besides saving on the makeup budget, is that it's much easier writing interactions between Aliens with Forehead Ridges and humans than it to do the same with Really Aliens.
  We can not only communicate, trade, and fight, but form joint business ventures, cheat each other at cards, and even fall in love.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Discussed in regards to space history. The universe has been around for a staggeringly long time, but the Standard Sci-Fi History rarely delves into anything much older than human space exploration. This makes some sense, since actually tackling the whole lot is very difficult. Even if the oldest aliens only appeared five percent of history ahead of us, that'd still leave 500 million years of history to write, which at a rate of a paragraph per million years would require something like a hundred pages or so of space. Most writers deal with this problem by just avoiding it.
• Sleeper Starship: One of the two main kinds of Slowboat, where people deal with the tedium of extremely long slower-than-light travel by hibernating over most of it.
• Space Clothes: Apparel in science fiction falls into a few categories, although it's usually all very tacky:
  • The most common variant is basically a jumpsuit or long underwear, sometimes razzed up with stripes, swooshes, or logo-like insignias.
  • War stories are likelier to include crisper military uniforms in the style of modern militaries.
  • Space feudalists seem to be the only people to reliably dress well. Men go around with swords, while women wear elaborate and low-cut dresses.
• Space Fighter: Space Fighters are a common element of space combat, since they make for interesting edge-of-the-seat heroics. They rarely have either FTL or any long-term flight independence, and are very reliant on their larger carrier ships. Their pilots are usually hotshot, swaggering twenty-something males eager to make their moves on attractive females of their own species or any other reasonably compatible aliens. They're basically a "translation" of the fighter planes attached to real-life ships, although given that they move in the same medium they'd be closer to one-man gunboats — which raises questions about both their tactical value and why exactly they can go faster than the big ships. They spend most of their time fighting the other side's fighters ("which is logical enough in itself but doesn't explain why they are used in the first place") or pulling last-minute missions against huge space stations that only they can breach; otherwise, their main role seems to be giving spotlight roles to hotshot twentysomethings so that they can show off their reflexes, daring, and smooth moves.
• Space Pirates: Piracy is quite common in the Known Galaxy — no surprise, given how much trade is going on. Robinson notes that the likeliest form for this is also not likely to be very exciting — a trading ship pursued by pirates is likely to simply jettison its cargo pods and run for it while the pirates come in to collect the containers, and then file an insurance claim at home. It's a fairly safe system, all in all, and everyone is happy except for the insurance companies, who can always just raise their rates.
  Come to think of it, the insurance companies aren't crying either. They merely hike their premiums. This might lead some rude people to ask who's conducting the real Piracy.
• Space Station: Three kinds are noted:
  • Battle Stations are nominally a form of space station, which unlike the others can move around and shoot things. Despite their name, they are really more like a sort of huge warship than anything else.
  • Habitats are artificial structures — sort of like a stationary spaceship — meant for long-term settlement in space. They became particularly popular in the 70s, once it fully sunk in that there are no habitable planets in the solar system and that space colonization would require creating your home living areas as you go. They're also popular with hard science fiction, since they allow space settlement without having to make up a form of faster-than-light drive. Their star has generally fallen in recent years, however, due to a few issues. Keeping a habitat running long-term is expensive and difficult, since you need to provide all of the ecological system that a planet provides for granted, and food production is difficult. The fact that habitats are also either highly reliant on resource imports, that they need a consistent link to external economies to warrant the cost of keeping them running or living there, and that maintaining a livable habitat means maintenance crews need unlimited access to all of it also ran against their original appeal, which was as a form of libertarian homesteading in space. Also, they never quite had the same appeal that the exotic frontiers of the interstellar galaxy have, and as such never caught on as a viable alternative to FTL-reliant softer settings.
    At bottom the goal of Habitats was to restore the old Solar System of the early GOLDEN AGE — when whole EMPIRES could rise and fall inside the orbit of Pluto — and to do so in a technically plausible way, with minimal HANDWAVIUM and especially no pure-Handwavium FTL. But you can't go back. We've gotten used to the Known Galaxy, and to swallowing FTL if that's what it takes to get there. Habitats were a pale substitute, and never quite caught on.
  • Space Stations by that name are more common in settings with habitual starship traffic and function more as ports of call or naval bases that towns in space. They usually administer commercial or shuttle traffic, act as travel waypoints, or are parked as guards around valuable spots. Most act as and look like naval ports in space, with a permanent population drawn by the constant traffic of people, goods and money, and hold everything from starship drydocks to trading depots to pubs and red-light districts.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Most fleets consist of swarms of small, one-man Space Fighters; small-to-medium-sized and fast Destroyers, which escort larger ships and stations, usually to protect them from Fighters; medium Frigates used for escort duty, scouting, and patrols; and huge Battleships or Battle Cruisers, the name not always delineating a clear distinction between the two, which are large and powerful ships. The strongest things around are Battle Stations, huge semi-mobile space forts slash superheavy battleships that can slag a planet with their secondary batteries.
• Standard Sci-Fi History: Science fiction histories usually begin with the outward push of colonization from Earth, which eventually results in the creation of the First Empire; this may happen quickly or may take thousands of years. The First Empire's golden age eventually falls into corruption and decay, and the Empire falls to give way to the long dark age and strife of the Interregnum. In time, a Second Empire is created to reunify the galaxy. As a rule, the second, lasting golden age won't be the focus of many stories, since not a whole lot of exciting things will happen. Older works tended to be fairly specific about when the history starts, but modern ones are vaguer to avoid becoming dated. Nothing of pre-human galactic history can be expected to be mentioned.
• Starfish Aliens: "Really Aliens" are one of the two main types of aliens, and are usually things like Energy Beings, Insectoid Aliens, or giant blobs of protoplasm. They're usually hydrocarbon life who inhabit the same general range of chemical and temperature gradients as humans, but things with really weird living preferences also turn up. They're difficult to talk to or figure out, and trade or political relations are usually scarce. Older fiction usually depicted them as hostile; modern fiction is less likely to show wars against them, mainly because it's not always clear what they and humans would want to fight over in the first place.
• Stealth in Space: Cloaking devices are a recurring element of science fiction combat that turn space battles into something like submarine warfare. They typically work through pure technobabble if they're explained at all, and tend to fail dramatically when someone sends out a communication at just the wrong time and gives the stealthed ship's position away.
• Technobabble: Techjargon, the vague but impressive-sounding terms that are used for the technology of science fiction settings. It's usually kept very vague, partly to avoid drawing attention to bits of science that don't actually work and partly to get on towards the exciting parts where people shoot lasers at each other. Some bits of common Techjargon made the jump to real life — for instance, "shuttle" was a popular science fiction term for small ships that ferry goods and people around long before being used for the NASA kind.
• Teleportation: When it isn't a term for shuttles or cargo spacecraft, "Transporter" refers to a machine that gets you from Point A to Point B without going through the points in between. It's very handy if you need to go between points separated by hard vacuum and don't have a spacesuit handy. It's very rare in modern science fiction because in practice it's basically magic.
• Terraform: Some discussion is given to the topic. Even with a lot of handwaving and soft tech, the process of pumping in oxygen, scrubbing out toxic gases, importing water, and building up an ecosystem from lichens up to people is a long and expensive process. As a rule, the prevalence of Terraforming is thus inversely proportional to the ease of interstellar travel, and this process is mostly done by people who have to travel in slower-than-light ships and just have deal with whatever world they end up on. Even settings with very easy FTL travel, however, can make use of limited Terraforming to make generally mediocre but still livable planets nicer, something like what was done with land reclamation in the Netherlands.