Voici un article de Ian McDonald qui parle des ballons dirigeables. 

Il est en anglais ici. 

Extrait : 
Airships are a mainstay of parallel universe stories – it’s Rule 1: at least one parallel universe has to have airships. Hands up here: I do; in fact my Everness series is named after Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth’s airship, and the ship (augmented by the multiverse-hopping Infundibulum) is your basic Go-Anywhere Machine. It was the image that birthed the story: an airship that can jump between parallel universes. 

Why do we love airships so? What is it that is so emotionally and aesthetically satisfying about them? They are uncanny, hanging there in the sky. They are big and substantial – yet they are mostly made of illusion: bags of empty space and thin bones, wrapped in a skin. They are gloriously improbable and impossible to ignore. They are landscapes, they are skyscapes: tame clouds. They make emotional sense, huge yet vulnerable, dignified yet self-aware of their unlikeliness. They don’t fly, they float. This is important: they are not aeroplanes. They are ships. And ships have a completely different emotional vocabulary. Ships need crews. Ships have space; ships have parts and locations: bridges, holds, companionways, cabins, hatches and hulls and engines rooms. Ships have room enough to walk around. Ships have dalliances and intrigues, affairs and rivalries and family. Ships are sociable things: enclosed, self-contained communities.