Last year’s book Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge takes place mostly on space colonies. It was the best sci fi book I have read for the past 5 or 6 years. Highly recommended read.
Down Below Station by C.J. Cheryl (sp?). It’s set on a station in orbit around the first habitable (and inhabited) planet found.
“Heavy Time” by CJ Cherryh.
Nobody mentions Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage? It’s a classic!
OTOH, both it and a lot of the ones mentioned here are set aboard large traveling ships, as opposed to colonies. I’d even call Deppspace 9 and Babylon 5 Stations, not Colonies. Along those lines, Panshin wrote three novels set on such stations, LONG before the TV series. The only title I can recall is The Thurb Revolution.
More recently, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes wrote Fallen Angels, about an attempt to return space colonists to their home. It’s actually an odd satire, filled with sf in-jokes that I probably have missed most of.
What about Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card? They take place at a school in space.
How hard is the science in all these books y’all are naming?
I’ll confess, I started this thread so I can do a literature review for a project of my own I’m working on. I like my science fiction boiled harder than a forty-minute egg, so for example, worlds that use centrifugal-force gravity are going to be preferred over “artificial gravity fields” and other super-science solutions.
I just remembered that many space colonies were referred to during the “Accelerando” in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, although they were usually offstage. A colony orbited Venus and was home to people with the mad scheme of terraforming that planet.
Another O’Neill-type colony left the solar system for another one that had a wet Mars-like planet in an Earth-like orbit.