SPACE HABITATS

   Stories of space stations or artificial satellites appear early in sf, the first example being Edward Everett HALE's extraordinary "The Brick Moon" (1869) and its sequel "Life in the Brick Moon" (1870), in which thesatellite of the title consists of many brick spheres connected by brick arches, and is launched, with people on board, by gigantic flywheels. Kurd LASSWITZ's Auf Zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two Planets 1971 US) hasMartian space stations shaped like spoked wheels floating above the poles, but these are kept hovering by gravity-control devices of a somewhat implausible kind. The first detailed and thoroughly scientific treatment is in Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY's Vne zemli (written 1896-1920; 1920; trans as "Out of the Earth" in The Call of the Cosmos 1963 Russia), a semifictionalized didactic speculation; it deals with free fall, space greenhouses for growing food, communication via space mirrors, and artificial GRAVITY effected by spinning the station on its axis - indeed, much of the spectrum of space-habitat ideas that would first begin to appear in any profusion after WWII, at a time when space travel by ROCKETS was generally realized to be something actually likely to happen.A highly influential book of popular science, dealing with (among other things) the construction of space stations was The Conquest of Space (1949) by Willy LEY, illustrated by Chesley BONESTELL, and it was after this that thespace-station story began to appear commonly in GENRE SF. However, the idea was not new to the genre, a celebrated earlier example being George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral stories, published in ASF from 1942, about acommunications space station in a Trojan position (60deg ahead of the planet) in the orbit of Venus.The image of the space habitat presented through the 1950s was usually (though not always) as a way station, a stopping-off point prior to flights deeper into space. Indeed, the usual term of the time was "space station"; another book by Ley was titled Space Stations (1958). Such stations were envisaged as being in Earth orbit, thefirst place you reach after leaving Earth. We see this image of the stopping-off place quite often in movies, an early example being CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955) and a later one 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), and ofcourse in books, as in Arthur C. CLARKE's children's novel Islands in the Sky (1952). Other 1950s books and stories in which the space station istotemic include Rafe BERNARD's The Wheel in the Sky (1954), Frank Belknap LONG's Space Station No 1 (1957 dos), James E. GUNN's Station in Space(1958) and Damon KNIGHT's psychological melodrama about the trauma of meeting an alien, "Stranger Station" (1959).One version of the theme that might have been expected to play a far greater role than it actually has in genre sf is the space station as menace, as a weapons-delivery platform in space easily able to target any point on Earth's surface. This notion has popped up occasionally in films, such as MOONRAKER (1979) (biological warfare) and HELLFIRE (1986) (a new energy source that can fry people). An early novel to use the theme is C.M. KORNBLUTH's Not This August (1955; vt Christmas Eve 1956 UK), in which it is hoped that a military space stationwill evict the Russians occupying the USA.Although this Earth-orbit phase of the space-station story has now largely been superseded, there is still in HARD SF a sense of real nuts-and-bolts excitement when the actual building of one is envisaged, and books are still written on the theme; e. g., Donald KINGSBURY's The Moon Goddess and the Son (1979 ASF; exp 1986) and Allen STEELE's Orbital Decay (1989).Soon, as the space station became absorbed into GENRE SF as one of its primary icons, they were popping up all over the place, not just in Earth orbit. We can obviously regard (perhaps not very usefully) all SPACESHIPS as space habitats, not tomention hollowed-out ASTEROIDS and, of course, GENERATION STARSHIPS. Alien space habitats of incredible complexity may be stumbled across by human observers, who have to make sense of their enigmatic qualities and deduce their purpose and the lifeforms for which they were built (BIG DUMB OBJECTS). 3 such works are Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973), JohnVARLEY's Gaean trilogy (1979-84) and Greg BEAR's EON (1985).One iconic space-habitat motif has the space station representing the anthropological observers in the sky, looking down at the primitives below, as in Patricia MCKILLIP's Moon-Flash (1984), where the superstitiously regarded flash ofthe title turns out to be the firing retro-rockets of spacecraft visiting the station; a particularly good example is Brian W. ALDISS's Helliconia trilogy (1982-5), whose observing space habitat, ironically named "Avernus", is central to the structure of the whole long tale, its"superior" observers standing for a civilization that is played out. The observers in Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970), filmed as SOLARIS (1971), are also played out and receive the come-uppance due to people whotry to hold themselves aloof, their space station becoming a shambles, as the LIVING WORLD beneath reconstructs in the flesh their most feared and desired memories and nightmares. An interesting variant of the space-habitat story is Fritz LEIBER's A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969), whose spectre is, in fact, the skinny body of a visitor from a space habitat who, unable to move properly in Earth gravity, is supported by an exoskeleton.The second boom in space-station stories was, like the first, catalysed by a book of popular science, this time The High Frontier (1977) by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'NEILL (1927-1992), which vigorously proselytized for the construction of colonies in space, either in Earth orbit or at one of the LAGRANGE POINTS - especially L5, 60deg behind the Moon in the Moon's orbit around Earth. The amazing long-range quality ofTsiolkovsky's prescience has never been more evident than in the fact that his predictions - not just of space stations, but of huge self-sufficient, heavily populated space colonies - took more than half a century to come to their full flowering in scientific speculation and in sf.One of the first writers to take O'Neill's tip was Mack REYNOLDS, in Lagrange Five (1979), The Lagrangists (1983) and Chaos in Lagrangia (1984) (the latter 2ed Dean ING from manuscripts found after Reynolds's death). Now that the space station was being re-envisioned as the space colony or space habitat - a home where people might live all their lives - its iconic significancewas radically changing. The space habitat has become the locus of the new, with everything old, washed-up and politically out-of-date being left rotting back on Earth while the real action is in space. The second new thing about space habitats has to do with diversity and cultural evolution: there can be a lot of them, each giving a home to a different political or racial or social group, so that the habitat takes over the function of ISLANDS in earlier sf as an isolated area that can be used as a laboratory in which to conduct thought experiments in cultural anthropology. (Not all these motifs are post-O'Neill, of course; some - including the idea of diverse habitats each catering for different tastes-were prefigured in Jack VANCE's eccentric "Abercrombie Station" [1952].)Among the many books of the past 15 years to make use ofspace-habitat themes, mostly along the lines suggested above, are Colony (1978) by Ben BOVA, Joe HALDEMAN's Worlds series, starting with WORLDS(1981), Melinda SNODGRASS's Circuit trilogy, beginning with Circuit (1986), Lois McMaster BUJOLD's FALLING FREE (1988), Christopher HINZ's Paratwa series, starting with Liege-Killer (1987), and Richard LUPOFF's The Forever City (1988). The idea is taken to its extremes in George ZEBROWSKI's Macrolife (1979; rev 1990), in which humanity largely abandons planetary environments in favour of star-travelling habitats.Obviously the iconic significance of the space-habitat story is evolving rapidly, a topic analyzed (rather differently) in "Small Worlds and Strange Tomorrows: The Icon of the Space Station in Science Fiction" by GaryWestfahl in Foundation \#51 (Spring 1991) (Westfahl has published pieces elsewhere on the same theme). Complex use of the motif - the space habitat both as cultural forcing ground and as creator of instability through cultural claustrophobia - appears in some key CYBERPUNK works, notably William GIBSON's Neuromancer trilogy (1984-8) and Bruce STERLING's vastlyinventive SCHISMATRIX (1985), and also - to a degree - Michael SWANWICK's Vacuum Flowers (1987). In only a decade we have seen the emphasis movefrom space habitat as brave new world to space habitat as a trap that corrupts and is prey to cultural and technological dereliction.Though space habitats are likely to remain popular in sf because of their peculiar usefulness in creating specific kinds of cultural scenario, in the real world the idea seems, outside a hard core of O'Neill cultists, to be receiving less and less support as something towards which we should currently be working. Although the theoretical advantages of low gravity and permanent energy supply are real, it is difficult to envisage any remotely plausible circumstances that would make the capital cost of space habitats, at least when considered in isolation, redeemable economically, nor any evolutionary advantages in the small-town-mentality balkanization (and shrinkage of the gene pool) that their building and occupation mightcome to represent.

   PN