Tower

This is a collection of short stories that all take place within a massive skyscraper-cum-nation state called Beanstalk. The idea of a building that is big enough, populous enough to be its own city state is kind of fun, but it is only really central to a couple of the stories. Not a whole lot connects the stories except that they take place in Beanstalk. I liked the first story, about the Tacit Power Research institute. It has a kind of silly premise that I enjoyed. I remember thinking a couple of the other stories had sort of sweetly hopeful endings, but not much else about the experience of reading these stories has stuck with me.

Really enjoyed this. A sharp political satire, in the form of a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. It mostly concerns itself with matters of (visible and invisible) power, mass media and information and hype, but is both touching (the elephant Buddha story) and funny (the dog as important power broker) as well as smart.

And the Appendix is fantastic: consisting of the full length versions of some of the stories and pieces of writing that were mentioned in the plot of a number of the stories in the "main" part of the book.