Books like The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

051216 from ??? childhood: this is the second review: can i truly say i have read this twice?- the first time was a paperback, with coloured illustrations, i must have been a teenager (under 17 my usual cutoff) so this was not first edition, which i see here was forty-two years ago! i had forgotten how much this book is dedicated to making the economic case, not relying on anything like the tech since common. in a way, this reminds me of verne, describing the fantastic according to his time, making it familiar, though O’Neill does seem aware of how contemporary and so limited he is making it, how conservative, only perhaps understating the tech if not the politics to reach high frontier orbit...so sentiment plays a role in this rereading, as it reminds me of my youthful, my utopian, my Star Trek idea of our future. all those economic details will probably be as absurd as 19th century ideas of a few gentlemen somehow launching to the moon, not least because his economic arguments rely on expansive solar power satellites as response to looming energy crisis. the project of O’Neill’s devising will be a greater project than back to the moon, let alone to asteroids or any Mars shot- but the arguments for mankind to create and live in such habitats and expand through the solar system, to live free of any gravity well (planet), to go farther, to become as a species immortal, no longer constrained to any one world, all make sense...eventually...encouragement: after the rapturous box office success of 'the martian' i am moved to revisit this book, read o so many years ago. ok, another from my childhood... when the apollo program was over the only human space excitement was 'skylab', and then the disappointingly infrequent shuttles to low earth orbit, even as we got used to weather satellite views, we got used to images actually received from the surface of mars, in this time got used to gps, got used to the internet, got used to apocalyptic global climate-change... this was and is never enough for me: this book, this beautiful dream, maybe politically implausible but always perhaps technically possible, encouraged me to dream sf more of the triumphant world-creating sort, sf and technology and science as the way of saving the future. so the economics were off by a few magnitudes. so our tech was not there yet. but the idea science could save us? as son of a scientist, around scientists, reading my dad's old scientific americans, i wanted to believe in these utopian possibilities. well i was a kid at the time... but this dream never ends but just pauses (and by now maybe the tech is getting there?)...