![]() ![]() “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. Through it all, Senlin gets to become a more decisive protagonist (often signified in the latter sections of the book with physical violence of a not-too-gratuitous level), maintain a basic goodness in a wild world, while the reader continues to discover new things about the Tower that click into place in satisfying ways. Josiah Bancroft’s protagonist, the eponymous Senlin, gets to go do stuff and see cool things, some of which genuinely have a sense of wonder or at least amusement to them the book alternates between action and introspection while bumping into a whole series of characters and set pieces that appear just long enough to show off their best elements and then fade quickly before anything can puncture them. It’s not hard to see why it succeeded as a self-published novel and then got picked up by Orbit. ![]()
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