It gives us the capacity to perform as others, and it gives us opportunity to interact on intimate terms with strangers, but it seems never to change anything.

No one knows who built the tower, yet it goes on forever. I don’t mean that the tower represents the internet rather, I feel as if this is the kind of twisting and endless world that the internet might be if it were made physical. He’s overwhelmed by his every encounter, and we get a variety of implied questions: what does it mean to be an individual in a world where life is so cheap? How can we establish friendships when all life is a contested negotiation? And What does it mean to have an identity in a place where we’re all defined transactionally? As I read the first half of this, I felt as if I were reading a fantasy that reflected the world of the internet. The tower of Babel is so vast that no one seems to know its boundaries let along its details. An unprepared scholarly newlywed loses his wife on his honeymoon in a fantastically imagined construct. This starts out as a 21st Century Kafka-esque fantasy. Either way, this weird novel seems to me worth a good bit of the hype it seems suddenly to be getting. This turns out to be, in effect, two books: one is interesting without quite being that much fun, and the other is a lot of fun while being less interesting. This quiet man of letters must become a man of action. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the illusions of the Tower. Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of luxury and menace, of unusual animals and mysterious machines. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel in the world. 'One of my favorite books of all time' (Mark Lawrence)

The first book in the word-of-mouth phenomenon debut fantasy series about one man's dangerous journey through a labyrinthine world.

Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft