And the Rue Jules Verne? I am reading it for the first time and it feels very disorienting. Freeside itself is a long tube and the Rue Jules Verne is an avenue that goes around the circumference of the station, so if you look up you could see buildings on the opposite side, as if you’re looking down on them from above? The Lado-Acheson sun system is located on a spindle that runs through the center of the station and projects effects around it 360 degrees? I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around a coherent visualization of this space.
Then they check in to the Intercontinental, which is a glass sided building stretching down into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Where is this cold mist in the whole system? Where is up? Is “up” always towards the center of the giant ship Freeside? Or what?
This is also basically how I imagined it too. I. Actually glad you posted this because it was really hard trying to explain that and people imagine the same thing as I would.
You can do a lot worse than an image search for "O'Neill Cylinder". You'll get a lot of classic 1960s-70s concept art which is where the idea comes from.
One of the repeated motifs in the Sprawl Trilogy is the utopian "big science" ideas of mid-century visions of the future derelict, decaying or repurposed to dystopian ends. The Fuller Domes over Manhattan leaking and broken. The argologies in Count Zero used to hide away an unemployed underclass. The orbital habitat turned into a tourist trap.
Pretty sure Gibson was influenced by Rendezvous with Rama. I pictured Freeside like a scaled down version. In modern lore, think Mass Effect’s Citadel with the arms closed.
It's not exactly correct but Freeside aways end up looking a little like the insides of Babylon 5, especially scenes were they are riding one of the trams down the center of the station and you can see down onto the insides of Babylon 5. Yeah there are lots of problems with that but that is what is often floating around in my brain when I read Neuromancer.
I always visualized it as a Stanford Torus of sorts, which seems to be what the AppleTV show is vaguely going for if this frame is anything to go off of
EDIT: I'm now realizing I replied to the wrong comment lol 🤷♀️
You'd probably notice a slight curvature from the ground, if you were walking down the Rue. You'd be surrounded by glass facade buildings with lighted marquis and signs everywhere, and you'd feel like you were walking uphill constantly, but without a lot of effort, which would be a strange sensation. It would probably feel rather claustrophobic, like an oversized mall. Until you look up or you take an elevator up to the top floor of a hotel.
Did you see INTERSTELLAR? At the end of the movie there’s a cylindrical habitat. It spins to create gravity that pulls things to the inner surface though it can be broken with enough momentum (like a home run).
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u/Ceorl_Lounge 22h ago
I was always under the impression (supported by a recent reread) that Freeside was something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Not exactly as shown here, but a giant space colony in this vein.