Tower Envisions Modern Society

By Chung Ah-young

Staff Reporter

Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper which is 2,409 meters high, is a city-state with some 500,000 residents. The building is the fictional virtual world described in rising novelist Bae Myung-hoon's new novel ``Tower.''

Better known as an science fiction (SF) novelist, Bae uses his social and humanistic approach to depict various types of people in this fictional and ``three-dimensional'' space based on a solid structure that uses the metaphor of modern civilization.

Beanstalk comes from the fairly tale, ``Jack and the Beanstalk,'' but the author actually took the idea from the elevator construction scenes of future skyscraper Burj Dubai in a television documentary.

In Bae's imagination, the city-state appears as an urban, high-tech construction with a strict class divide. The skyscraper is depicted as a ``three-dimensional'' structure, as opposed to the ``two-dimensional'' outside world.

But the book is more focused on socio-scientific imagination, rather than the engineering and technological approach which explains the construction of the building.

Beanstalk's transport is limited to elevators that are complicatedly intertwined and symbolized as state-of-the-art vehicles. But at the same time, they are inconvenient, as people must transfer several times to reach a different zone.

This unrealistic and exclusive sphere is a perfect state, equipped with everything from hospitals and real estate to borders between zones. They have problems with foreign immigrants, real estate, wars, diplomacy and love affairs.