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"[Science fiction] has become big business, where books are merchandised and promoted and distributed and placed on sale like slabs of bacon or cans of soup."
- Frederik Pohl
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| High Orbit Archipelago | ||
| The habitable spaces in high earth orbit. |
Where is "high earth orbit?" Low earth orbit includes satellites with perigee as high as 2000 kilometers. High earth orbit probably refers to objects in geosynchronous orbit or higher (period of revolution 24 hours or greater).
| Tessier-Ashpool ascended to high orbit's archipelago to find the ecliptic sparsely marked with military stations and the first automated factories of the cartels. And here they began to build. Their combined wealth, initially, would barely have matched Ono-Sendai's outlay for a single process-module of that multinational's orbital semiconductor operation, but Marie-France demonstrated an unexpected entrepreneurial flare, establishing a highly profitable data haven serving the needs of less reputable sectors of the international banking community. This in turn generated links with the banks themselves, and with their clients. Ashpool borrowed heavily and the wall of lunar concrete that would be Freeside grew and curved, enclosing its creators. |
| From Mona Lisa Overdrive,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1988 Additional resources -
|
It is interesting to note that the word "archipelago" means "chief sea" or Aegean Sea; it just happens that the Aegean Sea is peppered with tiny islands. In space, the term would refer to a region, rather than a particular formation of space stations.
The use of "archipelago" also serves a number of literary purposes for Gibson; it transfers a geographic term to the heavens in a very poetic way. In my mind, it associates ideas like "exploration" and "primitive" (thinking back to the exploration of earth's archipelagoes in the 16th and 17th centuries). It is really an inspired choice. The term is also used in Neuromancer by the same author (an earlier work).
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
