{4.5\/5} “I’d followed his career: the cover stories in the business magazines, the photos of him opening the New York Stock Exchange. I hadn’t realized that he was Carl, the kid from the playground, until he’d become a billionaire, lost most of it, and become a billionaire a second time: exhibiting a tolerance for risk that fit in perfectly with his behavioral profile during recess.”<\/p>\n
Atmosphaera Incognita<\/strong> by Neal Stephenson, published in 2019 (originally published in Starship Century<\/strong> in 2013)<\/p>\n Carl, the 11th richest man in America, has a dream: build a tower 20 kilometres tall. Emma, a real estate agent who knew Carl as a kid, goes to work for him. The tower survives Carl’s death from cancer, and it survives the type of changes that must be made on the fly because no one has ever built a tower this tall before.<\/p>\n Most of Stephenson’s books are very long novels — this is a novella. It won’t wow you the way that Snow Crash<\/strong> or Seveneves<\/strong> did, but it does have some interesting ideas.<\/p>\n It’s about technical challenges and human challenges.<\/p>\n