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Escapepod Episode 197: From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled… By Michael Swanwick

Find more great sounds at Escapepod.org Episode 197: From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled… By Michael Swanwick First appeared in Asimov’s Feb 2008 Imagine a cross between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that Gaudí—he of the Segrada Familia and other biomorphic architectural whimsies—had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the faintest ghost of a notion of the splendor that was Babel. Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.