Space opera premise: there is a god, but one who somehow got destroyed before finishing creating the universe. So we live in an incompletely built world that is missing obvious things that were meant to exist, like hyperspace travel and force fields. Title: Cosmic Technical Debt
this is interestingly adjacent to the premise of https://killsixbilliondemons.com/comic/kill-six-billion-demons-chapter-1/ … which explores a cosmology defined by the absence of the creator and the wars and mischief caused by demiurges that try to usurp the vacant throne.