Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
- William Gibson
 |
| 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.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from At the Bottom of a Hole
More Ideas
and Technology by Larry Niven
Tech news articles related to At the Bottom of a Hole
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
| Unrolling The Filmy Materials Of Space Tech |
| Bake in Space Bake-Off... In Space! |
| Free-Floating Planet Capture Not Rare, Says Paper |
| Spider Flyer Walker Space Suit For Mars Astronauts |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'Do I know protocol? Why, it's my primary function.'
'When unfolded and unrolled... it became a tough, gleaming film.'
