Well, for the past five months I have been working on a detailed description
of a single planet with a colony of (now) just about 60,000 humans, and now
I have about 50 pages of "canonical" material, some maps and many notes -
and there is still a surprising lot to do before I would call this science fiction
setting "complete".
And no, this is not unusual for science fiction. Just take a look at the Blue
Planet RPG, an entire RPG with lots of supplements, and all about one single
planet. Many Travellers GMs also have developed their planets to the point
where they are just as well described as any fantasy world, and one guy on
a world builder forum recently remarked that he will consider his world "fini-
shed" when he has written its capital's phonebook ...
As for science fiction novels about single planets, I could literally name do-
zens of them. Jack Vance alone probably wrote more than a dozen of such
novels, and there are lots of quite famous "one-world-SF-novels" by authors
like Heinlein or Niven. There are even at least several science fiction novels
about single cities.
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