Atmosphæra Incognita

Very cool idea and great story. Too short!! The description of the tower is believable and plausible. Well thought-out and well researched which added much to this short story.

whether he's talking about how the aftermath of the tower of babel could have served as a worldwide firewall to protect humanity from a meme monoculture that's susceptible en toto to a bad idea or casually talking about the nature of money and the value of minerals, or how we could leverage chains in orbit to get us into space, stephenson's always been a guy that makes me put down the book for a second to wonder, "who the f@#$ is this guy???" for me, that's stephenson at his best. he's like the school teacher that i never had and wished i did. except the topics that he teaches are speculative and is bound to just blow my mind. he has interesting plots and characters as well (the best imo are in his shockingly excellent REAMDE) but i confess that when he downshifts into infodump mode, that's when i rub my hands in glee looking forward to having my mind expanded to bursting. the entire, short book is basically an infodump wrapped up in an excuse of plot and character. everything else is SERVICEABLE but the real steak here is the infodump and creating a space tower... the characters are great. very very slight... but the amazing thing is that they're SHARPLY DRAWN for what they are... and it totally works. great stuff and if stephenson just keeps pumping out short stories just like this, i'll be there with a bib, steak and fork and ready for him to shut up and take ma money.

This is a quick read and not really in the style of anything I've read before of Neal's. This is good. I like to see writer's try out new styles of writing. The tale spans decades and a life telling about how a simple idea became a monster of a tower. It feels like maybe Neal will write another tale in this setting but I could be wrong. For $3 it is a fair deal for a kindle format. The hardcover price of over $20 seems less than ideal and I would understand if someone who wasn't looking closely and bought this might be very angry. My impression of the story reminded me a lot of Charles Sheffield's The web between the Worlds and Neal's recent SevenEves epic. Maybe he had originally planned on SevenEves starting in this setting before abandoning that idea. Maybe. It also reminded me with its optimism of David Brin's Tinkers comic. People should start dreaming big again.

I love this story. It's old-fashioned, Hugo Gernsbach kind of sci-fi, concentrating on the thrilling new technology draped in a custom-fit story suited to show off the new hardware. And a rousing pot-boiler of a story it is, set on the top (and the bottom, and the middle) of a new 20-kilometer-tall tripod tower reaching from the U.S. Southwest into near-space. The premise at first sounds goofy and "highly" unlikely, but Stephenson makes it seem like something that is inevitable. And if you have a difficult time visualizing it, you know what? Go see the new Brad Pitt movie "Ad Astra." The first half-hour to 45 minutes features Pitt as a ... what? ... Towernaut? The space tower is beautifully (and no doubt expensively) visualized and exciting as hell. The Stephenson story is incorporated almost intact, including the climatic disaster, a catastrophic electrical accident. Except, in the movie, the cause of the electrical disturbance is not anything as scientifically accurate as the ionospheric "sprites"in Atmosphaera Incognita; it is a bolt of plasma from outer space, from the edge of our solar system, in order to set up the remainder of the movie, which I will not reveal here. (Except to say that the beginning of this good movie was the best part. Go see it!) I didn't notice if Stephenson was credited in the film's credits. If not, he should have been! Anyway, it's a quick, excellent read, a stimulating idea, a tense, exciting story (maybe spends too long on finding the real estate for the tower?), and I highly recommend it.

Stephenson is best enjoyed when his books are longer. The idea was a cool one but there was a short build up and a pretty generic ending. No real closure to the idea. Still very well written but short.

This author is so good at (and apparently loves) designing habitats, the more challenging the environment, the better. Here we have a brief but highly engaging tale with his typical likable characters and a writing style that instantly translates into a viewable event in my head, so I’m watching a movie instead of reading…..which is my measure of a good tale, well told.

I'm not scared of heights in real life, but reading about a 20km tall steel tower and the platform on top of it made me feel queasy! I wish the story was longer, though. I would love to learn more about these characters.

For COVID reasons, I had more reading time over the summer than I have had for quite some time, so I went back and hunted down stuff that I might have missed from some of my favorite authors. I read SevenEves, followed by this. I was really happy to find some short fiction, and I enjoyed the story. It also dovetailed with SevenEves in an interesting way. Strongly recommended, if you are looking for a good, shorter read that has the feel of a lot of his longer stuff.