Tall Tower
Neal Stephenson’s Tall Tower has withstood the ravages of time, becoming a launchpad for humans seeking disembodied transhuman enlightenment among the stars and the centerpiece of a sprawling metropolis. Cowboy adventurer Cody Jennings and his horse Levi undertake a spiritual quest to climb to the top of the 20 kilometer behemoth. On the way up they overcome hardship and danger, encounter the tower’s inscrutable inhabitants, and confront one of life’s most vexing questions: as we strive to transcend our human limitations, can our horses go on the journey with us?
Saddling the Future
Written by Ron Broglio
Ron Broglio, Associate Professor, Department of English; Senior Sustainability Scholar, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State UniversityBruce Sterling confronts the reader with the problem of verticality—the dizzying heights of ascent with its slow release from warm temperature and gravity and oxygen and a protective ozone layer. Height has been a long looming quest for humans. In the opening volume of his A History of Religious Ideas Mircea Eliade begins by explaining…
Contemporary Skyscraper Construction
Neal StephensonRead the conversation >>It definitely seems logical to me that one would want to place [the Tall Tower] near well-developed existing infrastructure in the way of steel mills, transportation lines, etc. But you make a good point that the scale of the project is such that it would acquire its own infrastructure as it went up.
Human-Animal Studies
Human-Animal Studies (HAS) is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field that examines the complex and multidimensional relationships between humans and other animals. TwitterTumblrFacebookPinterestRedditStumbleUponemailPrint
