The Tower Through the Trees (Introduction)

While working on Fearful Symmetry, I was also writing a book. I was hoping to publish the book physically. However, other priorities have come to pass, making serializing it digitally more preferable. What follows is a solarpunk novel written by someone who's rather unfamiliar with the genre. There are parts of this story that are... triggering. If I recall correctly, there is at least one instance of implied rape, some homophobia and racism, and suicide. I've done my best to censor the slurs in the blog version of the book. I wouldn't say this is my best work, but I feel proud enough about it to publish it to you. A full uncensored PDF version of the story will be made available to my Patrons. I hope you enjoy it.

To Alex.

Please don’t sue.

“One day when we’re all gone, the creatures who come after us’ll find these old steel skeletons marching across the desert wastes or tropical swamplands. Think how mysterious they’ll appear, like the old stones are to us. The new caretakers of the Earth will wonder if these pylons were built to mark highways of unknown and forgotten power.”
-Grant Morrison

“Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.”
-Jorge Luis Borges

“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this had to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
-Maggie Nelson

There are many a story to be told of the City. Indeed, there are many a story to be told of its end. What follows is not the Historical account of what transpired in those final days. For History has a hermetic tendency of forming itself away from honesty. Honesty is a contradictory thing that never fully coalesces into coherency. But the coherency of History requires one to ignore the rudderless nature of humanity. All lives are stories in the end, with their own arcs and implications. They all just bungle into one another like a maw of cats in a room with a single ball of string. To call that cavalcade of cuteness coherent would be quite clueless. So instead, I shall tell the honest tales of what occurred that fateful time when the last of the Cities died…

I had wanted to end this bit with that ellipsis, but I had just used the first person in that last sentence, so I suppose I should explain myself. In truth, I am not a character in this story. Sure, I appear in it once or twice (and even then as a minor cameo), but I do not affect the story. I wasn’t even in the City for a large majority of this story. I didn’t even think I’d live long enough to be able to just miss such a story. I was lucky that I lived in one of the coastal places and was thus able to escape the ruins of America for slightly more stable shores (this being a metaphor, as I lived on a boat during the bad years. The less said about that, the better).

Once those years were done, I wandered the landmass calling itself Europe for a few years. But though I had a fondness for its ruins and the stitched together narratives it created, I found myself yearning for my homeland… the place where I was born. I’m old, you see. My hair has gone white like the snow of old (as opposed to modern snow, which is just now light enough to be black). I look like my grandfather. He died a while before the bad years.

But this is not my story. I am not ready to tell my story in full. I suspect that were such a tale to be told, it would be found scattered across the world in journals and margins like human dust on a windy day. This is the story of the way the world I grew up in ended. Of how all that exists will inevitably decay, but with that decay comes new life and new possibilities. It tells of sad lonely people coming together in the dark. It tells of other things as well. Things I, your humble servant, will never know. For though this is an honest story, it is still nonetheless a story. And storytellers rarely, if ever, know what they’re talking about. I know enough though. 

It ends with a bang, though it felt like a whimper. It begins on the streets of the City, one typically quiet night, as something inexplicable begins to happen…

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