This had such a fascinating premise, and I think it mostly delivered. I felt like I wanted a little bit more from it, but I'm not quite sure exactly what that was.

I knew this was a short story going in, however I still expected some sort of resolution of sorts. Otherwise a interesting concept and well written.

This novella was my first experience with Stephenson's work, so I don't know how it compares to his longer works. I enjoyed it, even if some of the more technical stuff got a little dull for me- other readers will find and have found it fascinating, just not my thing. Having said that, it was mostly interesting. The story is about a billionaire wanting to build a 20 KM high tower, and he enlists the help of a childhood friend to do so. There's a lot of story about finding the right piece of real estate for this venture, then a lot of science and engineering to get it built. In between, we get to know the main character, Emma, a bit better, as well as our billionaire, Carl. I liked Carl, he seemed like he'd be fun to hang out with. The story manages to keep your interest, even though there's not really any action till the end. The ending left me a bit wanting, it was a little abrupt to me, but YMMV. I would like to see the story continued, find out what happens once the tower is completed, what becomes of it. I don't know how likely that is, but one can hope.

#AtmosphæraIncognita #NetGalley

This is a great story about what the future could hold. Interweaving science with plausible stories, I really liked this gem.

Since this one is so short, there isn’t a great deal to say that won’t compromise the plot. So here is the synopsis from Goodreads:

Atmosphæra Incognita is a beautifully detailed, high-tech rendering of a tale as old as the Biblical Tower of Babel. It is an account, scrupulously imagined, of the years-long construction of a twenty-kilometer-high tower that will bring the human enterprise, in all its complexity, to the threshold of outer space. It is a story of persistence, of visionary imaginings, of the ceaseless technological innovation needed to bring these imaginings to life. At the same time, it shows us our familiar planet from an entirely new perspective, and offers vivid snapshots of the unique beauties and unexpected hazards of the “atmosphæra incognita” that lies between this world and “the deep ocean of the cosmos.”

I feel that this description is inadequate. Maybe I was reading a little too much into the blurb, but conjuring the iimage of the Tower of Babel story led me to expect some drama, some human interest. In fact, the comparison to Babel is only a physical one. This novella goes into detail about the building of an enormous tower, and while the human characters are interesting their lives and motivations are secondary to the feat of scientific achievement being accomplished. This book is very much hard Sci-fi. Which will be great for some readers … not so much for me personally. That being said, it was easy to read and absorbing. It is also very short at 104 pages. I enjoyed reading it even though I’m not into the technical details, I much prefer character development. If you like hard sci-fi then this would be a very good little morsel for you to whet your appetite on.

Atmosphaera Incognita by Neal Stephenson (Subterranean Press; 2019) is a reprint of an earlier novella (written in 2013), that is a shorter and more accessible introduction to one of the most renowned writers in the world in the field of what he calls "speculative fiction." Although this novella is less than 100 pages (making it about only 1/10 of the length of the majority of Stephenson's novels); still, this is truly a Neal Stephenson book. Though somewhat short on characterizations, the story contains the meticulous descriptions of the technologies represented in the work.

In this case, Stephenson riffs on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, describing the aspirations of Carl, the 11th richest man in America, and his dream to build the tallest skyscraper/tower the world had ever seen. The story is told through the view of Carl's childhood friend and now real estate procurer Emma. The story almost exclusively describes the building and testing of this structure and all the obstacles to be overcome --- from finding a site that was geologically workable and that the surrounding communities and governments would allow, to building a new kind of steel mill for the construction of the tower; along with all of the physical and technical difficulties to be overcome. Because of the tower's extreme height, most of the structure had to be pressurized to allow for oxygen. Plus elaborate jet engines had to be strategically placed around the outside of the tower to offset the ferocious winds and stressors that would be inflicted upon the tower at all hours. The prime bit of action in the novella takes place when a group of dignitaries are going to the top of the new tower to dedicate, and there is a freak lightning/electrical storm that threatens all of their lives. Because you see, when you are above the lower atmosphere, and into the upper mesosphere and troposphere, all kinds of atmospheric phenomena occur that we are not even aware of on the ground. But the disaster is mostly averted with only a small amount of loss of life.

True to Stephenson's style, his descriptions of geological and construction details, along with atmospheric conditions reflect a lot of research and consultation, but Stephenson can make these technical descriptions plausible and understandable. For readers who are new to Stephenson's work, this novella is a good place to start, and even to whet one's appetite for his larger and much more challenging works. Recommended.

First published in 2013; published by Subterranean Press on July 31, 2019

Atmosphæra Incognita first appeared in Starship Century, a 2013 anthology devoted to interstellar travel edited by James and Gregory Benford. Neal Stephenson uses the term “Atmosphæra Incognita” to describe a place “that, hidden from earthlings’ view by thunderheads, stretches like an electrified shoal between us and the deep ocean of the cosmos.” It is, he imagines, a dangerous place to dwell.

The narrator of this novella is a commercial real estate agent who is tasked with finding property for her wealthy friend Carl. He wants to build a steel tower, 20 km high. Most of the story addresses the logistics of building a tower that reaches into the stratosphere. The story is reasonably interesting even to those of us who don’t have engineering degrees.

Stephenson gives the narrator the rudiments of a personality. Her description of Carl suggests that he might have more personality than she does, but this isn’t a character-driven story. The most dramatic moment concerns an atmospherically endangered human near the story’s end. Most of the story’s drama, however, resides in the creation of a seemingly impossible-to-build structure and the creative solutions that designers devise to keep the tower standing in the face of menacing winds and upward traveling lightning strikes known as superbolts.

I’m not an engineering geek, but I thought Atmosphæra Incognita was surprisingly interesting. That’s a tribute to Stephenson, who took a break from writing science fiction epics to pen this novella. It is now available to readers who don’t want to track down Starship Century.

RECOMMENDED

This was my first exposure to Stephenson, which is surprisingly as he fits squarely within my wheelhouse. (Shamefully, I have both Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon sitting on my shelf at home.) When I saw this piece of short fiction, I thought this would be a perfect entry point. It was: I read it in a sitting. More speculative than sci-fi, his had just the amount of realism I like in such books. Although it was short, all of the characters and world felt realized. Needless to say, I will (finally) be picking up his other books.

I should preface this review with a disclaimer: This is the first work by Neal Stephenson that I've read. I know, I know, it's criminal. He credits Jeff Bezos in his acknowledgments, which makes a lot more sense when I realized he *works* for Jeff Bezos, sort of. And the character at the center of this narrative is not its narrator, a competent lesbian with a degree in comparative religion and no job prospects, but rather the brilliant tech titan and moneybags, Carl. It's Carl who gives the narrator a job that she ends up being rather good at, and which ends up involving a bit of real estate, a bit of project oversight, and a great scene involving abseiling down a structure that boggles the mind. Boggles it, but in a pleasurable way. If I had to guess, I'd argue that Stephenson's gift is taking complex structures and breaking them down into bits that make sense to even the most average of science fiction readers. (And that's me. I'm *very* average.) But back to Carl for a second; Carl is not just at the heart of the story, but also at the heart of the book's plot structure. Without his driving vision for a building that extends past the majority of the Earth's atmosphere, there would be no story, and without his death, there would be no reasonable explanation for the book's one extended action sequence. Carl puts all the characters in motion, and then draws them together when the plot requires. He's always present. And that, my friends, is symptomatic of (uh-oh, here comes my least favorite genre term) "hard" science fiction's obsession with the space-obsessed CEOs of Silicon Valley. If you, too, are obsessed ... then this novella will be pure heaven for you.

If you're disillusioned? This isn't going to open any new vistas for you.

Luckily, this is a novella--and novellas are tiny little self-contained thought experiments. They're perfect for exploring ideas without staying so long that they get on your nerves! I love novellas, and I'm always a fan of being introduced to an author by way of novella. I know enough from this short 100-page novella to know that a) I like Stephenson's style, b) I like big buildings and I cannot lie, and c) I'm still on the fence about characterization. It's a good start.

This one really didn't do it for me. It was a quick read, but it was pretty much just about building a tower, and engineering. This may appeal to some people, but it wasn't for me.

Unlike most of Stephenson's wonderfully expansive works of technical imagination, this is a novella. It mines an interesting story of a billionaire named Carl working to fulfill his idiosyncratic dream of building a 20-kilometer tall tower. Holy moly! For perspective, Mt. Everest is 8.8 km tall, or 5.5. miles.

The narrator Emma was Carl’s friend at age 12 and is picked by him to manage the project based on her track record in property management for him in recent years. Her girlfriend gets the commission to run the restaurant/bar that rises over the decades it takes to extrude the steel beams of the tower from below. As you can imagine, sealing it like a spacecraft is necessary after you get to Everest heights.

Most of the story dwells on various engineering challenges that must be solved, including foundation work on the scale of the Pyramids, rebooting the steel industry, and computer-assisted strategies to counter the impact of wind and the expansions and contractions due to extreme temperatures. The only real “action” sequence comes from the heroic human teamwork that takes place when Mother Nature makes an assault in the form of the strange powerful lightning recently observed from satellites to shoot upward toward space from the stratosphere (and believed to involve huge gamma ray bursts and likely antimatter production).

In sum, if you like the wonders of human engineering and appreciate a playful imagination on plausible problem solving in the face of challenges, this short read could provide you some satisfaction. For me, I would appreciate more on the personalities involved in an amazing endeavor, such as in McCullough’s account of the Wright brother’s development of the first airplane ("The Wright Brothers"). Greg Egan's "Phoresis", which features an alien race trying to build a space elevator, also suffers from the same limited level of character development (it also misses the plausible engineering in favor of exploring the cultural factors that might drive such a project over many decades). The reason I loved Stephenson’s nerdy "Seveneves" was the addition of diverse, fulsome characters to another engineering-focused story, in that case the building of a self-sufficient space station and riding out for many years a world-ending meteor strike of Earth.

This book was provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

A very detailed story on the construction of a space elevator from the eccentric billionaire financier to construction workers, to the property agent. This book has the type of the science that you would come to expect from Neal Stephenson, but an abrupt ending that will leave you disheartened.

For me, Atmosphæra Incognita was equal parts architectural fascination and tingling discomfort. It’s a quick story centering on a billionaire who decides to build an enormous tower tall enough to reach space. We primarily follow the workings and observations of the project lead, a childhood friend who was in the right place at the right time and landed this lifelong gig. I found the specifications and details fascinating, primarily because of my personal interest in architecture and infrastructure. You can imagine how complicated such a megastructure would be, and the many steps to build it are especially interesting from an economic standpoint. 

It’s notable that the whole project isn’t approached from a wild science fiction standpoint. Instead, Stephenson treats it like any other building project, imagining the governmental hurdles, the rebuilding of the American steel industry, and the complications of grumpy neighbors who don’t want to look at a huge tower in their backyard. The every day approach makes this impossible project seem possible, especially as the technical details are thrown in. The story ends with a quick conflict that’s horrifying to imagine as the characters cower in fear of a weather phenomenon, afraid they’ll be hurled from a billionth story window. 

Overall, Atmosphæra Incognita is a quick, detail-rich read that examines the many hurdles to creating an impossible structure in modern times. Given our society’s obsession with enormous buildings, it doesn’t seem too far fetched to imagine.

This is an interesting story about the technical challenges in building a structure that is 20 kilometers tall. For me, it would have been a lot more compelling if it had at least suggested a reason why anyone would want to do this. I guess the point is that billionaires don't need a reason to leave a phallic monument to themselves behind.

An eccentric billionaire decides that his legacy will be to build a 20-kilometer-tall steel tower. As nothing like this has ever been attempted before, the project poses massive engineering and supply problems, not to mention the political challenges of convincing local government and the local community at the proposed site to allow the project to move forward. The novella follows the construction of the tower over decades, offering a vision of how engineers might resolve some of the challenges of designing and constructing such an ambitious project.

While the story is told from the perspective of the billionaire's friend and employee who is involved in the project from the beginning, offering glimpses of her life over time, it is focused on exploring the ways the engineers resolve the unique design problems posed by extremely high winds, extreme temperature fluctuations, etc. that would come with building a structure that high into the atmosphere. It also offers glimpses of the uses to which such a structure could be put, such as an airport in the sky.

I thought it ended in an odd spot, with the story not quite resolved and the tower still incomplete (although nearing completion). It works as a fascinating thought experiment, more than anything else. Indeed, that seems to have been its purpose. This novella was originally published in Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer's Hieroglyph, an anthology of near-future, optimistic sci-fi stories of how technology and science can change the world.

In short, Atmosphaera Incognita offers a tantalizing tale of what human engineering might be able to accomplish, given the resources to do so.

As a long-time Neal Stephenson book, I was pleased to read this book. I enjoyed reading it, because it was full of the explanations that Stephenson does so well. It wasn't as satisfying as many of his books, however, because there just wasn't as much *there* due to the inherent nature of short fiction. I liked the narrator but I didn't get enough time with her. I was interested in the how and why of building the tower but didn't get to spend enough time with those questions - especially the why, although I have my theory. So I liked it, but would probably only recommend it for people who are already Neal Stephenson fans.

Great promise but way too short at 104 pgs. Self made billionaire Carl calls upon the help of an old childhood friend Emma, a real estate agent to help his plan to build a 20 kilometer high steel tower. This book takes you from choosing the right location based on weather, substructure and agreement of the area to the building processes and technical aspects needed to complete certain levels. This book was just way too short to feel a real connection to the characters and the whole theme of the book. The cover art for this book is absolutely fantastic and appropriate for the book theme. This book could have been so good if a couple hundred pages were added. That being said, I loved the concept.

Cutting edge science, retro style

The deep dark past of science fiction holds a slew of stories written mostly because the author (often a man trained as an engineer) had a cool technical idea that he just HAD to share with someone else. So he wrote a story around the technology putting in the characters as he went along. This short story by Neal Stephenson is like that.

I figure that, like many of us, Mr. Stephenson was thrilled to hear that we had recently identified new kinds of clouds; many new ones were added to the International Cloud Atlas in 2017, the first new ones in 30 years. With these comes the discovery of a new spectrum of upper atmospheric electrical disturbances discovered and studies by The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) program. Cool stuff very much deserving of a cool story.

Mr. Stephenson skydived into the task and delivered a modern tech story in the style of the Grandmasters.

This is my first experience with Neal Stephenson. It was much less intimidating than some of his other very lengthy novels. The premise is very simple: eccentric billionaire wants to build tower twenty miles high. It moves at a meandering pace, going over everything from the tower proposal to purchasing the real estate to the actual engineering of the tower and the various obstacles they must face.

But the science behind building something so completely impossible was fascinating, and I didn't mind the slower pace here. It's obvious that Stephenson does his research and is very thorough about it. It's incredibly imaginative and immersive. Little ideas kept popping up here and there like helipads and base jumping and they each put a smile on my face.

The characters were great. I adored Carl, which is truly impressive give that we never really meet him. And I liked Emma a lot too. Within the first few pages it occurred to me that she was someone I could have easily been friends with in real life, which I know sounds strange, but it isn't a thought that occurs to me about fictional characters often.

It all culminates in one explosive ending which I won't spoil. I very much enjoyed this and would recommend it to anyone looking for a quick break from their usual fare. Thank you to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for the ARC to review.

I am not a Neal Stephenson aficianado by any stretch of the imagination, only having read Seveneves previously and that is it, so I cannot speak to how Atmosphaera Incognita compares to his other work except that it is shorter. At its core, Atmosphaera Incognita is about building a space tower. That sentence doesn't sound nearly impressive enough to describe the scope of that project. This isn't a science text, but much of the story is built around the engineering of the tower - the challenge of the whole thing and the soaring success of accomplishment. It works.