A satire of a surreal technocratic future by the national-bestselling author of Lovecraft Country: “Dizzyingly readable” (Thomas Pynchon). High above Manhattan, android and human steelworkers are constructing a new Tower of Babel for billionaire Harry Gant, as a monument to humanity’s power to dream. In the festering sewers below, a darker game is afoot: a Wall Street takeover artist has been murdered, and Gant’s crusading ex-wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out why, in this wild romp by the acclaimed author of Fool on the Hill and Lovecraft Country. The year is 2023, and Ayn Rand has been resurrected and bottled in a hurricane lamp to serve as Joan’s assistant; an eco-terrorist named Philo Dufrense travels in a pink-and-green submarine designed by Howard Hughes; a Volkswagen Beetle is possessed by the spirit of Abbie Hoffman; Meisterbrau, a mutant great white shark, is running loose in the sewers beneath Times Square; and a one-armed 181-year-old Civil War veteran joins Joan and Ayn in their quest for the truth. All of them, and many more besides, are about to be caught up in a vast conspiracy involving Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, and a mob of homicidal robots . . . “[An] SF roller-coaster satirizing the horrors of our nascent technocracy . . . Told with breezy good humor, this exuberantly silly tale will find an audience among admirers of the day-glo surrealism of Steve Erickson and the tangled conspiracy theories of David Foster Wallace.” —Publishers Weekly “A turbocharged neo-Dickensian hot rod [with] plenty of intellectual horsepower.” —Neal Stephenson

The assessment, remediation, and redevelopment of manufactured gas plant (MGP) sites pose a significant technical and financial challenge to successor property owners, including municipalities and other public entities undertaking brownfields revitalization, and to their consulting environmental engineers. Due to the toxicity of many coal tar constituents, sites contaminated as a result of gasworks operations pose a significant threat to public health. This book will discuss the history of the manufactured gas industry in Massachusetts (the largest in the US), as well as the toxicity of gasworks waste products, technical challenges in the cleanup process, and the process for site cleanups.

Many of London's original power stations have either been demolished, converted for other use, or stand derelict awaiting redevelopment that is seemingly always just out of reach. However, in their prime these mighty 'cathedrals of power' played a vital role in London's journey towards becoming the world's most important city. Gasworks also played a key role, built in the Victorian era to manufacture gas for industry and the people, before later falling out of favour once natural gas was discovered in the North Sea. London's Lost Power Stations and Gasworks looks at the history of these great places. Famous sites that are still standing today, such as those at Battersea and Bankside (now the Tate Modern gallery), are covered in detail, but so are the previously untold stories of long-demolished and forgotten sites. Appealing to anyone with even the slightest interest in London, derelict buildings or urban exploring, this book uses London's power supply as the starting point for a fascinating hidden history of Britain's capital, and of the more general development of cities from the era of industrialisation to the present day.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.