Standard Candles takes place in the infinite multiverse where any story can happen. In it, lost things and beings from across existence tend to become stranded and accumulate, and have to figure out how to get their bearings and scrape by - amid cyber-witch smugglers, magic alien plushie knights from a planet shaped like a cone, and the augmented desk plant who works retail - all against the backdrop of a 3000 year old ultra-magitech civilization constantly sending forth explorers and contractors across the multiverse, trawling the depths of hyperspace and beyond for new items of power and beings of interest.

An enormous spectrum of physical laws (and magic systems) pervade the multiverse, ranging from "normal" cosmoi (universes) not unlike our own, to "weirdspace" worlds with habitable but odd physics like floating islands instead of planets, to even more abstract cosmoi saturated with alien forms and machinery mysterious in function to those who stumble upon them, to spirit worlds shaped by the shadows of the material realm and the after-echoes of the psyche.

Known Space teems with all walks of life from all walks of reality - explorers seeking out strange new worlds, interstellar mining lawyers who also happen to be lizard plushies woven from magic thread in an alternate history, psychic cowgirls who dive into the dreams of cybernetic forests, fluffy alien squid girls who also happen to be war journalists, bird gangsters for the space yakuza, and starship trailer park witches struggling under the dark pact called student debt, among countless other sorts. It's a magical cyberpunk space opera where the lives of ordinary people are shot through with the fantastical even when they're very mundane, and a setting where any crossover is possible.