# Literature set in space colonies **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 4, 2001, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718 "2001-09-04T18:30:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![edwino](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/35a633/32.png) [@edwino](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/edwino)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718/21 "2001-09-06T02:08:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Fugazi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f08c70/32.png) [@Fugazi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fugazi)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 10:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718/22 "2001-09-06T10:29:31Z")
Down Below Station by C.J. Cheryl (sp?). It’s set on a station in orbit around the first habitable (and inhabited) planet found. ---
**Author:** ![tavalla](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tavalla/32/89_2.png) [@tavalla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tavalla)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718/23 "2001-09-06T11:00:16Z")
“Heavy Time” by CJ Cherryh. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 11:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718/24 "2001-09-06T11:12:46Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Agrippina](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8797f3/32.png) [@Agrippina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Agrippina)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718/25 "2001-09-06T12:13:25Z")
What about **Ender’s Game** and **Ender’s Shadow** by Orson Scott Card? They take place at a school in space. ---
**Author:** ![Fiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e274bd/32.png) [@Fiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiver)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718/26 "2001-09-06T13:10:35Z")
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. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literature-set-in-space-colonies/79718.md?page=1)