Quote:The second issue is the whole "the 'Danelaw isn't interested" thing. This is one of the foundations of the whole edifice, and the general cultural indifference helps keep Fenspace its own thing instead of a wholly-owned subsidiary of USA, Inc. or whatever. Still, it has its limitations and probably the biggest one is without the massive population/economy sink of the terrestrial nations doing anything substantial on an interstellar basis is a couple orders of magnitude harder. But then that brings up the issue of more Earth involvement and how that affects Fenspace, and it's hard to not see how that would mess with the setting in a negative fashion.
Which is the final sticking point, I think. The current active writers (save yours truly) seem to be perfectly content with the status quo, and honestly the quality of work continues to be pretty good, so there's no impetus to change. Unless and until that shifts, I expect interstellar ops in Fenspace will continue to be a dead letter.
Well, I'm planning on messing with this point and upsetting the status quo after a fashion. I need to work on it today after I get my normal ponyfic done to get started on a revised opening (wasn't liking where the first was going), but yeah... the guy isn't going to like most of fenspace just leaving earth and the danes to their own business when they've got the tech to help improve lives all over the place, or barring that offer better economic opportunities to convince a pretty massive swell of danes from all over (including third world/undeveloped countries) to immigrate Up. Maybe pushing the population up to 15 to 20 million by 2021, with trying to make an immigration wave self-sustaining after that.