ORPHANS OF THE SKY

The best quality of this sci-fi novel might be described as a sense of finity. For generations the inhabitants of a five-mile long, all-enclosed space-ship have been drifting aimlessly through space. When the hero dizzily discovers all of Creation through a secret porthole, his fellows treat him as a Gellileo, i.e., jail him. He fails to get the ship back on course but he and a few friends (and a handful of girls) take off in a separate ship and begin colonizing a planet of their own. The characters are pulpy and the central parable too clotted with comic-strip invention; perhaps because this originally appeared in 1941 as an Astounding Science Fiction serial.