Boldly going because they're completely lost.
Space Academy is a Affectionate Parody Space Opera series by C.T. Phipps and Michael Suttkus.
Vance Turbo (real name: Vannevar Tagashi), is a space academy dropout who proceeded to find himself dragooned into a secret mission to stop a bunch of solar-destroying weapons from falling into the wrong hands. He proceeds to find himself in charge of the mission and through a series of unfortunate events, proceeds to fail upward into becoming one of the most celebrated captains in Space Fleet. Much to his chagrin.
Vance frequently finds himself the captain of a Ragtag Band of Misfits heading out into Wretched Hive planets as he struggles to find peaceful diplomatic solutions to situations that usually end up with people shooting at him. It then ends up requiring his knowledge of 20th and 21st century scifi, luck, and lunatic plans to save the day.
The setting is a Expy of Star Trek's Federation called “The Community” with the exception that humanity is a minor player in the galaxy and struggling to maintain a sense of relevance when it is a Naïve Newcomer species.
The series contains the following volumes:
- Space Academy Dropouts (2022)
- Space Academy Rejects (2022)
- Space Academy Washouts (2022)
It is part of the Futurepunk setting, which is The 'Verse for all C.T. Phipps' science fiction stories.
This series contains the following tropes:
- Abusive Precursors: The Elder Races treat the Young Races as disposable and elevate or destroy them at will. Their technological advantage is such that the Young Races have absolutely no recourse when they choose to do this.
- Absolute Xenophobe: The Notha consider all other races in the galaxy to be sapient animals at best and engage in slavery as well as genocide. This is speculated to be due to the fact they evolved as tiny omnivores on a Death World and are massively overcompensating.
- The Ace: Vance Turbo despite his many flaws is intelligent, clever, charismatic, and skilled at virtually everything he does. What he is not is very good at coping with the stresses of command or losses among his crew. It verges on him becoming a Broken Ace.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Notha are a race of fascists and an authoritarian totalitarian military dictatorship. They don’t consider other species sentient but talking animals. The Community races hold them in contempt in return with Vance struggling to treat them with the respect he doesn’t get from them.
- Badass Adorable: The Notha are adorable honey badger-lemur-esque humanoids. It makes the fact they’re a bunch of space fascists more bizarre.
- Benevolent A.I.: Earth incorporates these into almost all of their starships and they actually handle the majority of the economy, construction, and starship functions. Humorously, Vance realizes that crew aren’t actually all that necessary on most ships.
- Decon-Recon Switch: The book seems to be treating an enlightened Federation and collection of races working together for mutual advantage would never work. Instead, it becomes clear that it mostly does but plenty of people are suspicious of it or want to destroy it for their own ends.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Sun Killers (SKAMMs) are a strategic weapon of mass destruction that the deployment of during wartime would result in mutually assured destruction. Vance and many other individuals consider them to be innately evil but the fear of the other side having complete control over them keeps them in reserve. The weapons are initially introduced as "the nukes of their time" before Vance amends that to that the SKAMM is the SKAMM of its time due to its sheer destructive power.
- Doomed by Canon: Space Academy is set roughly eight hundred years before the events of Lucifer's Star where humanity lives in a Crapsack Universe. At some point in a few hundred years, Earth will be destroyed and humanity will enter a hundred year Dark Age due to its jumpspace systems being destroyed. AI will also be outlawed and bioroids will be reduced to the status of slaves. Interestingly, Vance is made aware of this and feels unsure about whether it's possible to avert this future.
- Epic Fail: How Vance’s parents died. They managed to crash their starship—which was automated.
- Expy: The Community is one for the United Federation of Planets.
- Famed In-Story: Many Earth-born captains have this reputation. This is later revealed to be an Invoked Trope as EarthGov compensates for its newcomer status by making extensive amounts of propaganda about its officers.
- Fantastic Racism: Most of the races in the galaxy get along fine. The major exception is the Notha and everyone else. Artificial people are also treated poorly by the crew and more like equipment, though Vance is an exception.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
- The Sorkanan Empire is very similar to the 19th century British Empire, despite being a bunch of bipedal Lizard Folk. At least in terms of how their spacers are treated (which is to say not well). Rum, sodomy, and the lash! Played with as we find out increasingly more that is proves this a very wrong assessment.
- The Notha are compared to the Nazis and generally disgust and repulse most races with their brutality. They’re actually more like The Empire with genocide apparently less common than slavery.
- Fantastic Nuke: SKAMMs (“Sun Killers”) serve as this both in-universe and as a Does This Remind You of Anything? example. Notably, they’ve actually been used once already in-setting and left much of the galaxy traumatized.
- The Federation: The Community is this in most ways, being an alliance of races working together for mutual advantage and under strict rule of law. Somewhat Deconstructed as they still have weapons of mass destruction and a large navy as well as spy network to enforce its will.
- Human Aliens: Played with. Most aliens are Starfish Alien types, but genetic modification has happened to several human branches. Most notably are the Ethereals who get called Space Elves by multiple characters due to their attitude and longevity.
- Humans Need Aliens: This is the backstory for the setting. Two hundred years ago, humanity was a Cyberpunk Dystopia on its last legs before being contacted by the The Community who proceeded to fix the environment as well as force badly needed forms that made Earth into a Utopia. Earth remains a minor part of the Community but has also had a lot of its standard of living as well as technology raised to galactic standards.
- Insignificant Blue Planet: Earth is a minor power in the Community and not even the most advanced human planet due to Transplanted Humans. Earth has only been space-faring for two hundred years or so and much of its efforts are to try to build up its military and technological forces to galactic standard. It's sadly Doomed by Canon since the Lucifer's Star series says Earth is eventually destroyed centuries later with her colonies carrying on.
- Killed Off for Real: Despite being a goofy space opera adventure series, there's quite a lot of deaths among the cast.
- Space Academy Dropouts [[Lorkan, Picnic, Fifteen, Ketra, and Captain Elgan are all killed off before the end of the story.]]
- Space Academy Rejects: Captain Klaws dies at the hands of a Suicide Attack.
- Space Academy Washouts has Julius Something and the Tool die to help stop Cthulhu and the Primordials.
- Lizard Folk: The Sorkanan race is the oldest and most powerful alien species in the Community. It is a humanoid race of these.
- Mildly Military: Space Fleet is said to be this compared to EarthGov’s Homefleet. All the various different cultures have different standards and expectations of its members, so they have a deliberately looser code. For example, Sorkanan women are expected to sleep with subordinates. Among other things, this allows inter-crew fraternization but not with subordinates.
- Naïve Newcomer: Earth is this to the rest of the galaxy, having only been aware of other races for two hundred years. Compare this to the Sorkanan who have been in space for the better part of ten thousand.
- Puny Earthlings: Earth has only been part of the Galactic Community for two hundred years and is still playing catch-up in technology as well as military forces. Ironically, due to Ancient Astronauts kidnapping humans and settling them, Earth isn't even the most advanced or powerful planet populated by humans.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: Humans who couldn’t adapt to the cosmopolitan tolerant nature of the Community found themselves making isolationist Cult Colony settlements in Contested Space. Vance has to deal with a number of Space Pirates Neo-Confederates for example.
- Robosexual: Implied to be considered kinky, if not perverse. Vance eventually gets into it. Interestingly, one of the main characters is a AI who downloads herself into a human body to experience sex with humans.
- Servant Race: The Ethereals serve as this for the Elder Races. They are uplifted members of existing races designed to serve as the Elder Race’s mouthpieces.
- Signed Up for the Dental: Apparently a very common reason for humans to join Space Fleet as it is still a largely backwater planet.
- Snark-to-Snark Combat: Virtually every character in the series is a wiseass and constantly playing off one another.
- Space Cadet Academy: The titular Academy is where all the future officers of the Community are trained. It has many campuses and students from all over the Spiral (Orion’s Arm). The branch that Vance attended had multiple environmental domes and was made inside an asteroid.
- Space Pirates: These represent a danger in the Contested Space part of the setting and are primarily made of desperate colonists trying to get rich by attacking automated shipping.
- Space Navy: Space Fleet is the galaxy’s largest collection of peacekeepers, explorers, and scientists. It is made up of member ships from each race and there are crew members from multiple species serving on other species ships.
- Starfish Alien: Most aliens are quite bizarre with tentacles, ooze, insectoid features, and more. The closest to human beings are the humanoid Sorkanan Lizard Folk and the lemur/honey badger-esque Notha.
- Star Killing: The purpose of the SKAMM missiles is to trigger supernovas in healthy yellow stars within a matter of hours.
- Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Elder Races are impossibly advanced aliens in the core of the galaxy.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Despite their epic levels of heroism, Vance and the crew’s reward is a relatively minor field commission as well as a citation for bravery.
- Transhuman: Many offshoots of humanity have been created by people adjusting to alien environments or space travel with genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancements.
- Transplanted Humans: One of the major advantages humans have is the fact that it turns out many colonies of these exist that include whole worlds of populations taken from Medieval and other times. This allows humanity to deal with other branches of itself even if they are rarely inclined to consider Earth to be anything special in dealings.
- Wretched Hive: Rand's World is a ultra-libertarian world run by pirates, criminals, and unscrupulous corporations. It is mostly desert due to being poorly terraformed and lacks most of the basic social services that are taken for granted on Earth and other Community worlds.
