I have always been fascinated by habitats in space. Now I’m not taking about those small structures with a couple of pressurized rooms and maybe space for a dozen people. No, I’m talking about those multi-kilometer long and multi-kilometer wide cylinders or rings or series of domes that might house ten to a hundred thousand to a million people in an artificial world with plants and trees and maybe even some animals. Like miniature planets in their own right. I have seen designs on the internet, and videos on Youtube, but the things just aren’t used enough in science fiction literature and film. Rama was a self propelled habitat with no people, on a journey to another star, passing through our system. Babylon Five was a space habitat, though we were mostly treated to corridors and rooms. There were always the few tantalizing visions of the artificial habitat as seen by the center mounted train car, with fields and foliage and houses in the open. We may never make it to the stars. We may never terraform other planets in our system, though I believe we will, someday. But I am sure that we will build massive habitats in space, maybe by the millions at some point, establishing a Dyson ring around our sun. They could each house their own culture and government, a place for people to try out new things while still within range of rescue should those things go very wrong. We can experiment with different gravity fields, even if artificial gravity is never developed, just by changing the rotation speed of the ring. I believe that a whole new world will open up for us, and maybe Earth will be relegated to the position of place to be nostalgic about and preserve as a museum, but just too hazardous to actually live on. There are plenty of materials in space to construct huge numbers of such structures, from metals, to carbonaceous materials for soils, to volatiles for air and water. They are just there for the exploiting in the Asteroid Belt and the Cometary Halo around the system.
But what about these places as settings for stories. That is the part that really fascinates me as a writer, the millions of different settings that can be constructed in a hard factual universe where the stars are out of reach and the planets to inhospitable for more than mining bases. Now these structures can contain surface areas in their rotation rings or cylinders from dozens to thousands of square kilometers, larger than most counties in the United States. Imagine them forested, or filled with jungle. And imagine hunting preserves stocked with animals that were illegal to create. Or cults of peoples who don’t want the scrutiny of outsiders. Or plagues or viruses, or maybe even nanites. And imagine entering this structure through the hanger area, and seeing a thousand square kilometers of jungle, not just to front and side, but also overhead. Of winding rivers in the sky. Of people who may have reverted back to savagery, or mutated to some new form. This would be plausible setting for many of the old pulp style adventures. I have some ideas for settings like these, and may explore them in the near future when my current projects are done. A setting for a sequel to The Deep Dark Well, or in one of the sequels to the future series based on that novel. Or perhaps a volume of short stories, all showcasing a different environment on one of the habitats. The possibilities are endless. It surprises me that more has not been done in this area. Maybe the time is coming.