Sliding Void's main polity is the Triple Alliance (often simply the 'Alliance' or 'TA'), a bureaucratic multi-world confederation of the three dominant species, of which humanity is one. Most of the books' events occur in The Edge, a lawless independent region of free worlds bordering the Alliance. While guest of honour at Toronto's Ad Astra convention, Hunt described how he had written the series as a homage to fill the void left by the cancellation of all of his favourite TV science fiction series: "Star Trek", "Stargate", "Firefly", "Battlestar Galactica" and "Farscape" (the void of the series title being both an allusion to this, as well as 'Sliding Void' being used by spacers as slang for sub-warp transit).