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The article is Mother Earth Mother Board, unfortunately the Wired online archive version linked here is missing the pictures. I highly recommend it though, definitely worth a read, and you can tell some of his ideas in Cryptonomicon (published 3 years later) were already in his head. Here's my favorite quote from that article, one I think of surprisingly often:

>Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

(I recommend A Thread Across the Ocean since IIRC there was not actually all that much in How The World Was One about the transatlantic cable.)

I got the same message about the physical copy but the kindle version is $2.99.

Also, from the description on the Subterranean Press website, I think it is his short story from Hieroglyph (https://www.amazon.com/Hieroglyph-Stories-Visions-Better-Future/dp/0062204696/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1567967608&sr=1-1) with a little extra content. I got that when it came out and read it then. My recollection is that the story was interesting.

Has anyone read both? I'm wondering if it is worth buying if you already have Hieroglyph. For $3, I'll probably get it, but I'd be interested in other thoughts.

It's a longish chapter in Hieroglyph from a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Hieroglyph-Stories-Visions-Better-Future-ebook/dp/B00H7LUR3K

I re-read it last week in about an hour. It's about a 20 km high tower and all the challenges that come with building such a thing.

Considering the price for the novella, maybe buy Hieroglyph instead. Better value and you get a lot of other stories from other authors as part of the package.

It's on kindle. It's a great read, to see him develop his skills.

The Big U https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0011GA0AM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_nJBLBb4GW3BJR

This page has a comment implying it was an early working title for Seveneves. It has a link to amazon that would support this interpretation.

>I'm not looking to read several 1,000-page tomes.

/u/minustwofish: "Fuck you. Here are several 1000 page tomes."

...how about instead you pick up Europe by Norman Davies, which is as the title might imply, a history of Europe. Things I like about it:

• Achieving an artful balance between the depth of purely academic
  texts and the readability of a book intended to be read by people who don't already know a lot about the subject.
  
• For the most part, is a straightforward expedition through all the major events of European history, but also has several dozen "capsules", which are digressions of one or two pages each, into topics and incidents that are quirky, notable and generally interesting enough to do a dive into - which the otherwise strictly chronological structure would make difficult to cover.
  
• Anglo-centrism. Many history books written in English tend to give undue weight to the impact of English-speaking peoples on the events of a particular place or period (and in particular tend to treat Britain in Europe as having exceptional and therefore exceptionally noteworthy characteristics). This has resulted in the past, in works that purport to be histories of Europe where Poles and Slavs for example, almost do not feature at all despite comprising a giant proportion of the population of the continent. "Europe" avoids this by treating Europe holistically. Readers can expect to learn about all of Europe, not just the parts that were relevant to events occurring in Britain.
  
  Chapter eight covers the period 1650-1789 - which anyone looking to get a primer on the background of Quicksilver will find very relevant.

Kindle version is showing up as "not currently available for purchase" (for me at least). Link

You can get it as a bound volume on Amazon. It loses a lot, though; it was initially released as a "multimedia experience" in the form of an app. I've been trying to find an APK or something for years, but it seems to be lost.