Where is neuromancer set

Some things never change? We hope not. Zion is a colony in space built by five workers who just up and refused to come back to the overcrowded rock that is Earth. As a result, its construction seems more slapdash than Freeside's. The current inhabitants of Zion follow the Rastafarian ideology. One of the tenets of Rasta is the return to Africa by the descendants of slaves, where they hope to establish a free state.

In a way, the Zion colony of Neuromancer is the realization of that African free state, only in space, so minus the zebras. Freeside is what you'd get if you combined Abu Dhabi and Las Vegas, shoved them into a giant cylinder, and shot it into space. The rich and powerful either live in Freeside full-time or go there to play as often as they can.

But Freeside does have a dark side to it. The Tessier-Ashpool family uses it as a base of operations just like the Mafia used Vegas back in the day. The wealthy can use Freeside as an "orbital Geneva," meaning they can have secret back accounts for their less than stellar income earnings.

There is also a seedy side to the entertainment in the form of "meat puppet" brothels and hardcore drugs. Straylight is the personal home of the Tessier-Ashpool family. The structure, like the family, is eccentric and hidden away from the outside world. According to 3Jane, Straylight is a "desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of micromechanical decay and sabotage" In short, it's a maze that's always being added to and reworked even as it's breaking down.

When Molly infiltrates the facility, she finds parts of it are littered with antique books, sculptures, furniture, and the like, all in various states of disarray and blanketed with dust. Cyberspace is a graphical representation of information that connects to all the databases and computers in the world—a virtual reality version of the Internet if you will. At the beginning of the novel, cyberspace is represented by a three-dimensional grid, and the structures of data take on the form of geometric shapes like pyramids and cubes.

As the novel progresses, and Case digs deeper and deeper into the reality of cyberspace, the grid system gives way to more realized realities. At first, Wintermute takes Case to realities based on his own memories, like the office of Julius Deane.

Later, Wintermute is shown to be able to morph the grid system into "decidedly nongeometric" shapes Next Up In Film. Sign up for the newsletter Verge Deals Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Just one more thing! Please confirm your subscription to Verge Deals via the verification email we just sent you.

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For the video game adaptation, see Neuromancer video game. The corresponding Wikipedia article was the original source for this article. Retrieved Douglas Walker website. The Guardian London. Science Fiction Studies 26 Neuromancer ". Literary Review of Canada. Worlds Without End.

Nova Express 4 4. In Penley, C. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. Books by genre London: The Observer. Tangent Short Fiction Review. Archived from the original on October 19, No Maps for These Territories. Wired 3. Marvel Enterprises. Berkley Trade. Archived from the original on Marketwire Hollywood. Retrieved 10 April Total Film. Retrieved 21 May Pre-visual effects work has already begun.

Comtex Los Angeles. Retrieved 2 August Gibson presumably made a similar face when we questioned the date of his book. A lot has been made of Gibson's foresight over the years: in Neuromancer, he not only imagined a fully-realized internet a solid decade before the real thing caught on, but also sketched out a host of anxieties associated with the web that sound, well, a lot like the things that scare me these days about Facebook and Uber.

There's a technology in the novel, for instance, called a "neural cutout"—it lets you rent out your physical body like an Airbnb, allowing an employer to direct you cybernetically to perform sex work or worse—that reads today as a searing critique of the gig economy.

Until, that is, you recall that neither the web nor the gig economy existed in Once you start looking, Neuromancer is filled with eerie parallels to the present. It anticipates in varying detail the cloud, military and commercial hacking, commercial space travel, reality television, cosmetic surgery and designer psychoactives. Even the names of its drinking establishments sound trendy by today's standards: Le Monde, Crickateer, Emergency.

Gibson himself, I should point out, is an admitted slow adopter, and ambivalent about his cult as a computing oracle. In the decades since publishing Neuromancer , he's argued that the novel's gritty setting is less speculative than a reflection of the s, or at least an aspect of the era characterized by a sort of casual brutality that's hard to fathom for a gentle 90s kid like myself.