Posthuman Blues

This L-5 Society site features some fantastic concept art of self-sufficient space habitats. (I remember losing myself in some of these paintings when I was really young and naively assuming off-world colonies in my lifetime were more or less a given.)





There's a well-rounded collection of short fiction and science fact revolving around the space station theme called "Skylife," co-edited by Gregory Benford. It includes a great opener by Ray Bradbury, Greg Bear's "Wind From a Burning Woman" and others, as well as color illustrations. I highly recommend it; the last time I saw it was in Borders a couple years ago, marked down for clearance. Check your bargain rack.*

In reality, I think the first true large-scale space stations will look rather less than "cool," at least by design standards of the 1970s. I expect lunar colonies, for example, to look like plastic-shrouded refugee camps; already, Bigelow Aerospace is working on inflatable living modules for orbiting space stations. At first glance, such structures will seem markedly less substantial than Gerard K. O'Neill's famed designs. And they might, in fact, be less than glamorous compared to O'Neill's utopian visions of verdant, pastured fields and zero-gravity merry-makers. But they'll be our first true homes away from home, and as they proliferate they're bound to take on engaging new forms, like wildly mutating bacteria.

*For a good dystopian riff on O'Neill's designs, see John Shirley's "Eclipse."