Worlds was published by Viking Press in 1981, the first volume of a trilogy (followed by Worlds Apart in 1983 and Worlds Enough and Time in 1992). The novel follows Marianne O’Hara, a young woman from New New York — one of forty-one orbital colonies (“Worlds”) circling Earth — who travels to the planet’s surface for a year of study and finds a civilization in terminal decline.
Earth in 2084 is fractured: the United States has fragmented, resources are depleted, political systems have ossified, and the relationship between Earth and the Worlds has become poisonous — Earth needs the Worlds’ resources and resents its dependence; the Worlds need Earth’s population base and fear its violence. Marianne arrives just as these tensions are reaching crisis, and the novel’s climax involves a catastrophe that destroys most of civilization.
Haldeman’s near-future world-building combines Heinleinian attention to social and political systems with a post-Vietnam awareness of imperial decline and institutional failure. The Worlds are not utopias (each has evolved its own social pathologies) but they represent a diversity of social experiments that Earth’s monolithic nation-states cannot accommodate. Marianne’s perspective — formed outside Earth’s culture — allows her to see clearly what those within it cannot: that the system is dying, that the catastrophe is not aberration but consequence.
Collecting Worlds
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1981): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $3–$8