I’m putting this here because it does have a factual answer, and I’m asking two questions.
(1) I read, not too long ago, a short story set on the Tower of Babel. Unlike the story in the Bible, this one got built and went past the moon. People hiked up it and lived on it for lifetimes.
Usually I remember where I read stuff, but I can’t track this down. Possibly read it on the Internet.
(2) Googling for this has proven frustrating. Google “short story” and “tower of babel” and I get things that are not relevant, like “Tower of Babel biblical story.” “Fiction” plus “Tower of babel” gets me things like “Is the Tower of Babel fiction?” and “Tower of Babel: Fact or Fiction?” Duh.
How would I google for it?
I’m also looking for a short story called “Skin’s Art” that appeared in Playboy magazine at some point, probably in the 1980s. As in, who wrote it, has he ever written a novel, is it in a short story collection? No luck googling that one either, or at the library’s new database (which sucks).
“Skin’s Art” appears to be by Michael Rogers, and appeared in “Playboy” in 1973. I found it by using “Google Books” to search for “Skin’s Art”. The story appears to be collected in “Do Not Worry About the Bear” http://www.amazon.com/Do-not-worry-about-bear/dp/0394501918
“Tower of Babel” first appeared in Omni Magazine, and was reprinted in various “Year’s Best” anthologies and the Nebula Award Anthology in 1991. It is one of Ted Chiang’s worst stories – which makes it better than 99% of all the other stories written in the past 20 years.
Ted Chiang is known for writing very few but very consistently good stories. He’s only published twelve stories since 1990 (when “Tower of Babel”, his first story, appeared). Four of them won Nebula Awards and a fifth was nominated for a Nebula Award. Four of them won Hugo Awards. Three of them won Locus Awards. There was also one Sidewise Award, one BSFA Award, and one Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.