From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled
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| "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Michael Swanwick | |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publication | |
| Published in | Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine |
| Publication type | Magazine |
| Publication date | February 2008 |
"From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" is a science fiction short story by American writer Michael Swanwick, originally published in the February 2008 issue of the Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. It was nominated for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.[1]
The story is about a human and a millipede-like alien who flee the destruction of a magnificent alien city.
"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 Gaudi—he of the Sagrada 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."[2]