Virga Trilogy

Schroeder, Karl. Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga. New York: Tor, 2007.[1][2] Queen of Candesce. New York: Tor, 2007. Pirate Sun. New York: Tor, 2008.

The websites linked above in the notes give (as of this date) a number of reader reviews. Books 2 and 3, Queen and Pirate, reviewed quite professionally by Dominick Grace, SFRA Review #285 (Spring 2008): pp. 25-26.[3]

Like Schroeder’s other novels, this trilogy unfolds in a far future world radically affected by technology; in this instance, the “world” is a manufactured environment somewhat like a Dyson sphere. Virga is a constructed hollow world, powered by artificial suns, including the main central sun, Candesce, and populated by wheel and cylinder city-states that maintain artificial gravity by rotating but that, despite the technology necessary to create Virga in the first place, otherwise operate at technological levels for the most part closer to nineteenth-century than twenty-first century standards. Virga has been designed as a kind of haven from radical technological advancement, so most technology requiring electricity is nonfunctional as a result of a dampening effect created by Candesce. As a consequence, these novels might be described as far-future steampunk. Tor describes them as hard SF space opera, an equally applicable designation [...].

Relevant here for steampunk[4] and for humans enclosed in "a manufactured environment."[5] For the Dyson Sphere, cf. and contrast, e.g., Orbitsville and The Rise of Endymion — and the variation in Larry Niven's Ringworld works.

RDE, finishing, 13Jan21