The queen and her court lived in an enormous palace crafted from mother of pearl, thinner than an eggshell, clear as glass, pregnant with all the colors of the ocean. The castle stretched for miles along the Starlight Trench. Entire cities grew within it, floating amidst forests of kelp and the rocky salt pillars that suspended its high ceilings.
—Lost Cities: "Fabled Cities: The Driftwood Emperor"
According to a London Administration Council sign on the gates the yard had been designated as a site for one of the proposed Central-South dome's support pillars. Though God knows when construction would ever begin. Central-North dome was visible above the razor wire trimming the yard's wall. A geodesic of amber-tinted crystal, four kilometres in diameter, squatting over most of the Westminster district like some kind of display case for the ancient stone buildings underneath. The struts were tiny considering the size of it, a type of superstrong fibre grown in orbit, glinting prismatically in the achingly bright sun. Empty gridworks for the Chelsea and Islington domes were already splintering the sky on either side of it. One day all cities will be like this, sheltering from the hostile climate which their own thermal emission has created.
— Sonnie's Edge by Peter F. Hamilton
A word about Abdul's digs. Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger brother of the Emir of Mars, lives in a gothic palace on the upper slopes of Elysium Mons, thirteen kilometers above the dusty plain. Elysium Mons is so big you'd hardly know you were on a mountain, so at some time in the preceding five centuries one of Abdul’s more annoying ancestors vandalized the volcano by carving out an areophysical folly, a half-scale model of Mount Everest protruding from the rim of the caldera. Thus, despite the terraforming that has turned the crumbly old war god into a bit of a retirement farm these days, Abdul's pleasure dome really is capped by a dome, of the old-fashioned do not break glass, do not let air out (unless you want to die) variety.
—Trunk and Disorderly by Charles Stross
