the crews of generation ships described by Heinlein and Anderson;
Anderson's Lunarians;
Asimov's City-dwellers, troglodyte Solarians and Trantorians;
Cherryh's stationers.
There must be more? Are any of these futures desirable?
Addendum: Asimov's Eternals are permanently based in an indoors environment that is somehow outside normal space-time, although of course it has its own internal space and time, and some Eternals occasionally enter the Terrestrial timeline at earlier or later moments but this novel is so logically incoherent that I did not really want to mention it. See The Logic of Time Travel: Part II.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think all "enclosed" environments off Earth have to be unsatisfactory. O'Neill, in his book THE HIGH FRONTIER, has argued for the possibility of building truly huge habitats where millions of people could live comfortably, including having farmlands, forests, rivers, lakes, etc., in them. And built from using resources found off Earth. Naturally, of course, we should start with small O'Neill habitats and go on from that.
I don't think O'Neill habitats much interested Poul Anderson, because they are seldom seen in his stories. Albeit MIRKHEIM mentions the Council of Hiawatha taking place on a habitat of that kind. And we see some of them in the HARVEST OF STARS books.
Ad astra! Sean
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