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Do you remember the first time I shared this here? It's an amazing 3D animation of an O'Neill cylinder space colony, by Mark A. Garlick.
I want to share it again because it has kept evolving since then, but it is still so, so evocative of some passages of my novel Seven Drifts, barring a few details. I can't get enough of it.
Going back to Mark A. Garlick's work, I found a couple more gems in the same vein. Here's the same space colony, but shown in a vertiginous, seamless trip from exterior to interior.
Enjoy a quick glimpse of one of the city's many landmarks, and take a good, long flight through one of its dramatic cities.
Fascinating, right?
(If you're wondering what the... this is about, just see Wikipedia's simple, clear explanation of what O'Neill Cylinders are.)
My story Seven Drifts takes place in a stranded starship city called Seven that's been adrift for two centuries. Seven is a long stack of gigantic O'Neill cylinders, much like the one imagined in these wonderful 3D animations, but somewhat bigger.
In Seven, each individual cylinder is called a district, and each district has vast rural and urban areas, or neighbourhoods.
You might have noticed the city rods that join the ground level to the central axis. Seven uses them too; they're an integral part of the story setting. The mid-altitude circular structures we see in the 3D animations could be part of Seven's weather systems, which are also an important feature in the story. Because as we know, weather can malfunction, climate can change, and it usually means mischief.
Maybe I'll tell you about Seven's Underlevels later, or about the Eights - The axial structures in Seven's districts have many uses other than weather, water circulation and north-south, inter-district transportation.
Okay, now tell me, because I need to know...
How would you feel if you had to live in a place like this? Would you feel happy and free all the time, fulfilled and spectacular, with a strong sense of infinite possibilities everyday of your life? Or to the contrary, would you feel stressed out, claustrophobic and boxed-in, or caged, and depressed, like you're a prisoner? Would you feel any other way, like perhaps, dizzy, or disoriented? Or would you be content to bask in the singular beauty of the place's artificially natural spaces? To you as an inhabitant, would the colony (or district) seem more like a city, or like a whole country, or rather, even, a world?
Oh, and here's a question for the nerd in you: Inside an O'Neill cylinder space colony, what are the cardinal points? How do you tell north from south, east from west?
Feel free to comment at the bottom of this post. (Or just reply to this email.)
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