Domed Hometown: Difference between revisions

 

{{quote|'''Moe:''' What are you telling us, we're trapped like rats?<br />

 

A town enclosed under a dome.

 

 

Fairly traditional for [[Underwater City|underwater cities]] or space colonies in SF.

 

== Anime and Manga ==

*** However, it is strongly implied that {{spoiler|the rest of the city is under a dome too, just a dome so large that they don't know it's there.}}

* Domed and apparently doomed: most (if not all) of the cities of ''[[Ergo Proxy]]''.

 

== Comic Books ==

** In [[Pre Crisis]] [[Superman]] comics, Lori Lemaris's Atlantis survived its sinking with a giant dome. They later removed the dome after biologically changing themselves into merpeople to survive underwater.

* The city Anvard in Carla Speed McNeil's ''[[Finder]]''.

 

== Film ==

** The book version had people (and cities, etc) all over the Earth, with no domes.

* The Mars colony in ''[[Total Recall]]''.

* The enclave in ''[[Zardoz]]''.

 

 

== Literature ==

 

** The underground cities of Earth were built to be armored against nuclear bombs. Trantor's evolvement into a planet-wide city took a thousand years as the center of a galactic empire.

* David Wingrove's ''[[Chung Kuo]]'' series provides an example of this, with seven enormous domed cities housing 36 billion people.

* [[Lois McMaster Bujold|Bujold's]] ''[[Vorkosigan Saga|Vorkosigan]]'' books features two fairly important planets whose entire population is contained by these due to in-progress [[Terraform|terraforming]]; Beta Colony (the homeworld of Miles Vorkosigan's mother), and Komarr (annexed by Barrayar a generation ago lest it gets bribed or strongarmed into permitting ''another'' invasion). The technological and social implications are rather well discussed.

** The Cetagandans in the novels also use "force domes", but they can be switched on and off, and are used for temporary containment (prison camp) or just as security perimeters (the Celestial Garden). It's also possible to control the weather within the dome, which ensures the Emperor in the Celestial Garden doesn't get rained on.

* Featured in the teen dystopian novel ''Devil On My Back'' by Monica Hughes.

* Some cities in ''[[Red Mars]]'' are in tents (some of which are dome-shaped), supported by the higher air pressure inside.

* The idea is [[Older Than Radio]], appearing in the 1881 socialist and white supremacist fantasy ''Three Hundred Years Hence'' by British author William Delisle Hay. Hay's book describes a future civilization where most of humanity lives in glass-domed cities beneath the sea, allowing the surface to be used primarily for agriculture.

* Steven Millhauser has an odd little short story called "The Dome" where he describes a world where first domes were built over individual houses, to protect them from weather, burglars, etc, then neighborhoods became domed, then entire cities, and finally the entire world was encased in a giant dome.

* In [[Stephen Baxter]]'s ''The Time Ships'', London (and most surviving cities) are domed with concrete as protection against the bombs of an artificially-prolonged World War I. {{spoiler|The dome gets broken while we watch.}}

* In the Adept novels by [[Piers Anthony]], the inhabitants of Proton live in domed communities because the mining of protonite has ravaged the planet's ecology, rendering its atmosphere toxic.

* A domed city ''within'' a city appears in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', as the cactacea of New Crobuzon built themselves a gigantic greenhouse to live in.

* James Blish created not only domed cities out of familiar earth cities like Pittsburgh and New York but they travelled through space looking for work in his "Cities in Flight". The domes and the motive force for taversing the stars were created by enormously powerful machines he called "spindizzies"

 

== Live Action TV ==

** Honorable mention goes to Terra Venture of ''[[Power Rangers Lost Galaxy]]'', which was of course covered by a dome because it was a colony ship designed to take a city of people to another planet.

* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', "Beneath the Surface" and "Revisions". Each with a [[Aesoptinum|dark secret]]. Not to mention Atlantis from ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'', at least under the Ancients when they had the power to maintain the shield.

* ''[[Blake's Seven|Blakes Seven]]'' sets most of its first episode in one.

* Troy in the re-imagined [[Battlestar Galactica]] was this according to a deleted scene. The [[Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story|mining accident on Troy]] was a massive explosion that caused the dome to collapse.

* The [[Precursors|Silver Millennium]] is reimagined as one of these in ''[[Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon]]'', while the rest of the Moon at that time had the barren surface we know.

* Alpha Complex in ''[[Paranoia]]''. Unless it's actually an [[Elaborate Underground Base]]; only Friend Computer knows for sure!

* Aquas, an undersea version, is one of the quirkier outposts of the Alphatian Empire in the Mystara D&D setting. {{spoiler|After the Alphatian mainland sinks in the ''Wrath of the Immortals'' Adventure Path, Aquas becomes the new capital of what's left of the Empire. At least, what's left on the outer world.}}

 

== Video Games ==

 

* In ''[[Spore]]'' if you place a colony on a planet with poor atmosphere then it'll generate a domed shield to protect its inhabitants.

* In ''[[Digital Devil Saga]]: Avatar Tuner 2'', humans who don't want to get turned to stone by the corrupted data coming from the Sun have two choices: live in these, or become [[I'm a Humanitarian|man-eating demons]].

* In ''G-Police'' the various sections of Earth's colony on the Jovian moon Calliso are contained within domes to contain a breathable atmosphere. The domes appear to be made of a mesh of laser beams but they make a metalic clanging sound if they are rammed. In one mission some terrorists hijack a train-load of bombs and attempt to detonate them in one of the tunnels that connect these domes in an attempt to fracture them.

 

* Frédéric Bastiat, a 19th century [[Deadpan Snarker]] economist, in his satirical "Candlemakers Petition", suggested that the government should build domes around cities, to protect candlemakers (and industries that are involved in candlemaking) from "harmful" competition from the Sun. This was a [[Take That]] against protectionists who argued that importation of foreign goods ought to be restricted.

* The Habitat and Biosphere 2 projects, in which researchers were attempting to live in a self-contained environment (to see what sort of problems they might run into if they built similar structures in, say, outer space). Results were rather poor. This was unfortunate for prospects of space travel, naturally.

* An idea to build a domed city in Alaska, to be called "Seward's Success", was (unsurprisingly) never built.