In the future, Earth has won a gruelling war against an extraterrestrial civilisation. As a monument to human resilience and his own awesomeness, an egotistical billionaire plans to build an enormous residential tower out of a unique kind of rock mined from the alien homeworld. The rock is black and gives off a curious warmth. But what if it is also alive?
So goes the story of The Tower, the central chapter of Nina Allan’s brilliantly ludic novel, which is presented as an extract of a novel of the same name, written by a fictional and near-forgotten novelist of the mid-20th century. The main line of Conquest, though, happens in the present, where a group of online conspiracy theorists take The Tower to be an accurate prophecy of an actual forthcoming war among the stars. This is, of course, known to terrestrial governments, who have a secret supersoldier programme and are probably whacking people who find out too much.
