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"…we store information differently, reading a science fiction story, to make it make sense."
- Samuel R. Delany
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| Orbital Terminus | ||
| An airport in space; a terminal for low earth orbit flights. |
The obvious model for Gibson's terminus is the retro cool spaceport used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
| Japan Air's orbital terminus was a white toroid studded
with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings
of docking bays. The terminal above Marly's g-web-though
above had temporarily lost its usual meaning displayed an
exquisitely drafted animation of the torus in rotation, while a
series of voices in seven languages announced that the
passengers on board JAL's Shuttle 580, Orly Terminus I,
would be taxied to the terminal at the earliest opportunity.
JAL offered apologies for the delay, which was due to routine
repairs underway in seven of the twelve bays.
The interior of the JAL toroid was so bland, so unremarka- ble, so utterly like any crowded airport, that she felt like laughing. There was the same scent of perfume, human tension, and heavily conditioned air, and the same background hum of conversation. The point-eight gravity would have made it easier to carry a suitcase, but she only had her black purse. Now she took her tickets from one of its zippered inner pockets and checked the number of her connecting shuttle against the columns of numbers arrayed on the nearest wall screen. |
| Technovelgy from Count Zero,
by William Gibson. Published by Arbor House in 1986 Additional resources -
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
