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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SKyOdin" data-source="post: 5205662" data-attributes="member: 57939">I for one find a huge amount of inspiration in Japanese mecha anime. Pretty much all of Gundam, as well as dozens of similar series, count as Fusion age in terms of setting. Even if you don't want to have giant robots running around, they are a great example of how you can have epic space warfare without ever leaving Earth's orbit. They also show that space stations and space ships don't need to be cramped. It was Gundam that introduced me to space habitat designs like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus" target="_blank">Stanford Torus</a> or the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Three" target="_blank">Island Three</a> habitat (AKA the O'Neill Cylinder), neither of which can really be described as cramped.I think the issue is that the Mars trilogy and Ben Bovas work (i presume, since I haven't actually read it) are a particular genre focusing more on a broad-scale look at the process of colonization and terraformation, rather than simply telling stories in a Fusion age setting. There is a big difference between the Mars trilogy, which covers the entire colonization of Mars over a period of centuries, and the story of Zone of the Enders, which covers a Martian uprising against Earth rule during a period of only a few years in the middle of what could be considered the "Blue Mars" era. While in the former all of the main characters are big scientists and politicians, in the latter the protagonists include various teenage space colonists, a Callisto miner, various young soldiers, a kid who spent his entire life on an interplanetary passenger ship, and the Fusion age equivalent to a trucker with a dysfunctional family.</blockquote>

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