A lot of you have asked about the backstory of the Tower: how long it took to build, and what prompted its construction in the first place. Since the world of The Thousandth Floor isn’t a dystopian world—plenty of people live outside the Tower, in rural or suburban areas, or normal non-vertical cities (just wait till book 2!!)—the reason wasn’t that New Yorkers had to build a Tower, it’s that they chose to, as an investment in their future.

The concept is called vertical urbanization: the idea that cities of the future will grow upward rather than outward. As a self-contained city, complete with apartments and schools and hospitals and shopping and even parks, the Tower is an extreme version of vertical urbanization. But it’s not that far off! Already some of the supertowers in Asia and in the Middle East are starting to include features like this—interior parks, retail areas, even helipads so that you can land there straight from the airport. Maybe a thousand-story Tower won’t seem so crazy in a hundred years…

The Thousandth Floor takes place in 2118, twenty years after the completion of the New York Tower (which residents call simply “the Tower”). Avery’s dad Pierson Fuller had proposed the project years ago, but it took a while for him to convince people–and then finally, in 2095, New Yorkers finally voted in favor of construction in a citywide referendum. If you live in New York, you can imagine how many people still protested the decision