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"I think we could solve our problems more easily through strength of character; but that's always been a commodity in extremely short supply."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Bubbleworld | ||
| A rigid space station that is shaped like a cylinder, rotated to achieve centripetal gravity. |
Niven paints a great picture in this story, one of his earliest.
| TWELVE STORIES BELOW the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing
pastures, and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in
neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five
miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of
the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer's Asteroid. Five miles
above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split
by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers, a sky alive
with the tiny red glints of self-guided tractors.
Lucas Garner was half-daydreaming, letting his eyes rove the solid sky. At the Belt government's invitation he had entered a bubbleworld for the first time, combining a vacation from United Nations business with a chance at a brand new experience--rare thing for a man seventeen decades old. He found it pleasantly kooky to look up into a curved sky of fused rock and imported topsoil. "There's nothing immoral about smuggling," said Lit Shaeffer. The surface overhead was dotted with hotels, as if the bubbleworld were turning to city. Garner knew it wasn't. Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter's occasional need for an Earthlike environment. Belters don't need houses. A Belter's home is the inside of his pressure suit. |
| From At the Bottom of a Hole,
by Larry Niven. Published by Galaxy Magazine in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the city of space, from a Jack Williamson story Prince of Space in 1931. Also, see can city from Hyperion (1989), by Dan Simmons.
Jack Williamson had the idea of space miners who lived in their suits; see osprey space armor from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson.
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Then some unknown race had chanced upon the dreamers and decided to "help them out."
'Improving man by bringing him close to Nature, while they combine the sensations of coasting with the interest of seeing the country well...'
Um, how about that pension for the humans who serve as the models for robot behavior?
'...used as surrogates in intense dependency cases.'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
