Grand Central Arena

A George Lucas Throwback Space Opera novel by Ryk E. Spoor.

The Sandrisson Drive promises to give humanity Faster-Than-Light Travel of the distances-are-shorter-in-hyperspace variety. But when the Holy Grail, the first manned FTL ship, transitions into Kanzaki-Locke space, it finds itself not in a featureless void, but contained within an enormous sphere encompassing the volume equivalent to the solar system. Outside the sphere is the Arena, where thousands of alien races interact and compete according to the rules laid down by the Precursors who built it. And if Captain Ariane Austin and her crew are ever to get the Drive running again and get home, they'll have to face the wonders and dangers of the Arena and stake out a place for humanity in a universe stranger than they ever imagined.

A sequel has been announced as in progress^[when?], with the working title of Spheres of Influence.

Tropes used in Grand Central Arena include:

• Absolute Xenophobe: The Molothos. The Arena system forces them to interact non-destructively with other sentients, and they are not happy about it.
• Absurdly High Stakes Game: This is the core and essence of life in the Arena; if the name "The Arena" didn't clue you in, the fact that the "Challenges" can cost you entire solar systems should.
• Air Whale
• Artificial Gravity: Check. Double check. Lift off a Sphere and you still haven't escaped it.
• Asteroid Thicket: Justified; they aren't actually asteroids, but it's still a space obstacle course (with some actual asteroids as part of it, or at least Really Big Rocks).
• Big Dumb Object: They don't get much bigger than the Arena. A scale model of the entire universe is just the start of it.
• Bio Augmentation: “Biomods”, anywhere from cosmetic changes to military enhancements.
• Blood Magic: An element in the Faith's initiation. And the Shadeweavers'.
• Brain-Computer Interface: Many people on Earth have direct interfaces with their AI-equipped personal organizers/communication devices, to the point where Ariane is considered a bit odd because she doesn't use the direct interface unless she has to. This does mean that she's the least affected of the crew when all their AIs suddenly stop working.
• Brain Uploading: Backups are mentioned in passing.
• By the Power of Grayskull: How The Faith and the Shadeweavers grant their powers.
• Calling Your Attacks: The Shadeweavers. And the Faith, though they tend to be a lot more flowery.
• Clarke's Third Law: The Faith and the Shadeweavers. The whole Arena is this, too.
• Cool Gate: In person-sized and starship-sized forms.
• Curtains Match the Window: Ariane's hair is noted as being almost the same shade of blue as her eyes.
• Divided for Publication: The Japanese edition of Grand Central Arena is split into two volumes.
• Energy Ball: Of the made-of-electricity sort. One of the Shadeweavers' attacks. Word of God says that any energy type can be used; Amas-Garao just likes the zappy ball.
• Enforced Technology Levels: Certain technologies just don't work in the Arena -- AI; nuclear reactors; nanotech beyond certain limits. This is assumed to be due to The Arena's deliberate intervention; it doesn't want you having those things to play with, so you don't.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: The Faith's approach to training.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional:
  • A list of fictional creations that have become bywords for rogue-AI fears: Frankenstein, SkyNet, Monolith.
  • Ariane compares the Faith's ceremonial music to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Satterli's "Jovian Themes".
• Floating Water: Check!
• George Lucas Throwback: To the pulp space opera of E. E. "Doc" Smith and his contemporaries.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Hyperion Project.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The way the Hyperion Project came apart was a complete disaster.
• Heavyworlder: Invoked by the designers of the Hyperion Project. Marc DuQuesne is an example of the results.
• Hive Mind: The majority of the Blessed-To-Serve.
• Hollow World: The Spheres.
• Humans Are Special: Humans are more willing to take risks.
  • And on top of that, Word of God says that humans have a special ability that they've never noticed because they've only been competing against each other.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Most of the humans with regard to hand weapons. Of course, in the Solar System of GCA, the "simulators" are just as good as the real world (or can be: some people prefer to play with the realism dialed down).
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Invoked by Dr. Sandrisson, whose preferred outfit is a white suit of which the coat is tailored to resemble a lab coat.
• Meaningful Rename: The leader -- and only surviving member -- of the Liberated goes by the name "Orphan".
• Nanobots: Commonly used, not considered especially scary. Used for in-flight ship repair (“Nanomaintenance”), medical support (medical nanos) and sensors and other purposes.
• Nothing Up My Sleeve: Marc has a back-up pistol in sleeve holster.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Again, Arena physics. No A Is, no uploaded intellects, and apparently even body modification past some as-yet-unspecified point will fail.
• "No Warping" Zone: Sandrisson Drives, even when inactive, interfere with each other, which wouldn't be an example of "No Warping" Zone except that drives jump from the volume of a solar system to the artificial "Spheres" which are much smaller. A smallish number of ships occupying a Sphere can entirely prevent jumping from anywhere in the solar system.
• Pardon My Klingon: Simon swears in Japanese. There are also a couple of instances of swearing being described instead of quoted, including that old standby, an invitation to perform an anatomically impossible act (which gets interesting when alien anatomy is involved).
• Planet of Hats: Most of the groups that matter to the politics and the plot are those which are organized or naturally inclined to wear one hat. Strictly speaking, though, they're mostly multi-species organisations who share a common outlook because that's the basis of the organisation; only two species are pretty much uniform -- the Blessed To Serve, who are controlled by super-AI overlords, and the Molothos, who hate everyone uniformly.
• Platonic Cave:
  • The Hyperion Project took characters from fiction and raised people in simulations to make them into those characters, with excellent results apart from the ethical issues, the Mary Sue, and it all falling apart at the end.
  • Also what one of the characters assumes when they initially discover where they are and the impossibilities (such as artificial gravity) they see. Marc, having been been raised in such as environment responds rather negatively to the idea.
• Power Incontinence: Ariane, after the climax.
• Precursors: The Voidbuilders built the Arena. There is no consensus on their motives, their continued existence, or their divinity.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Molothos.
• Shock and Awe:
  • The Shadeweaver's Energy Ball attack.
  • Ariane Austin has a contact-weapon biomod derived from electric eel biology.
• Good Old Fashioned Space Opera: What the author was shooting for.
• Shout-Out: Lots, notably Lensman/Skylark Series and Schlock Mercenary.
  • Several in-universe shout-outs to E. E. "Doc" Smith (both Lensman and Skylark Series) due to Ariane being a fan.
  • The Hyperion Project also provides in-universe shout-outs to the Skylark Series, as well as Doc Savage, Sherlock Holmes, and Journey to the West.
  • The Tayler scale used for rating artificial intelligences is named after the author of Schlock Mercenary.
  • Also a lot of other SF and Anime material. If you look closely at Orphan's description, you'll realize he looks like Perfect Cell.
• Sliding Scale of Realistic Versus Fantastic: Unusual.
• Subspace or Hyperspace: They thought they'd invented your standard jump-into-hyperspace-to-shorten-distance drive. Then they found someone else got there — an entire universe of “there” — first.
• Training from Hell: The Hyperion Project, maybe.
• Translator Microbes: The Arena provides.
• Unobtainium: Indestructible matter made of quarks, without bothering with atoms along the way.
• Why Am I Ticking?: Room-temperature-superconductor loops built into your armor are no longer energy storage devices when they're above room temperature.
• World in the Sky: Most of the volume of the Arena.
• World of Cardboard Speech: Marc DuQuesne. "Your mistake, you pea-brained overbearing pompous crayfish, is that you think you have any idea of what you're dealing with."
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Ariane has blue hair, which she was born with as a legacy of genetic tinkering in one of her ancestors.