The Fountains of Paradise (1979)

...The Fountains of Paradise is an intellectually stimulating novel. I enjoyed reading it very much, in particular for the detail of the construction process on the space elevator. That being said, I'm not sure it is worthy of the awards is won. It contains a lot of stuff that Clarke had done before. Stylistically, Clarke is not a brilliant author and his characters are mostly fairly flat. By 1979 rigid scientific accuracy and a sense of wonder were no longer enough, or sometimes not even necessary, to make a science fiction novel stand out, which makes the choice for a novel that is supported completely by those who things a bit odd. Still, Clarke does what he does very well. For fans of his novels this is definitely not one you'll want to miss.

Full Random Comments review ( )

One of Clarke's finest! As always his characters are both immensely plausible and utterly empathetic.
The principal protagonist is this novel, set in the mid twenty-second century by which time Earth has already colonised the Moon, Mercury and Mars, is Vannever (Van) Morgan, one of the world's leading civil and structural engineers most renowned for having designed the Gibraltar Bridge. Morgan's current dream is a space elevator, stretching from the isle of Taprobane (a scarcely disguised Sri Lanka) up to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, 25,000 miles in geo-synchronous orbit, using the newly-minted hyper-filament technology.
To achieve this feat he has to overcome opposition in the form of a centuries-old community of Buddhist monks established in a 2000 year old monastery at the faith's most sacred site. Meanwhile Clarke gives us some of the history of the ancient kingdom of Taprobane (incorporating a potted but scintillating history of pre-Medieval Ceylon).
Clarke is not merely a master of the technologies (real and imaginary) with which his characters grapple; he also manages, seemingly effortlessly, to develop flawless plots suffused with totally credible human interests. His work has been one of the most compelling arguments to show that science fiction can also be worthy of the term "literary fiction". ( )

A good science fiction story by the Master which combines two main concepts. The first is the development of a "Space Elevator", a structure which reaches from ground level to beyond our atmosphere, enabling mankind to escape Earth's gravity at pennies per pound instead of millions of dollars. The second concept is a familiar one given a fresh treatment here, in which a distant race has sent an artificial-intelligence probe, whose mission is to initiate First Contact with other intelligent races in the galaxy. The conversations between the people of Earth and this first voyager from a distant sun are worth the price of admission alone. Throw in the setting, which is an island very much like Clarke's beloved adopted home of Sri Lanka, and you have a very engaging and thought-provoking story by a legendary writer of science-fiction. ( )

Arthur C. Clarke

The Fountains of Paradise

Gollancz, Paperback, [2001].
8vo. 257 pp. SF Masterworks #34. Foreword [p. 13], Afterword [pp. 251-255, 1969-78] and Addition to the Afterword [pp. 256-257, 1989] by Arthur Clarke.

First published, 1979.

Contents

Foreword

I. The Palace
1. Kalidasa
2. The Engineer
3. The Fountains
4. Demon Rock
5. Through the Telescope
6. The Artist
7. The God's King Palace
8. Malgara
9. Filament
10. The Ultimate Bridge
11. The Silent Princess

II. The Temple
12. Starglider
13. Shadow at Dawn
14. The Education of Starglider
15. Bodhidharma
16. Conversations with Starglider
17. Parakarma
18. The Golden Butterflies
19. By the Shores of Lake Saladin
20. The Bridge that Danced
21. Judgment

III. The Bell
22. Apostate
23. Moondozer
24. The Finger of God
25. Orbital Roulette
26. The Night Before Vesak
27. Ashoka Station
28. The First Lowering
29. Final Approach
30. The Legions of the King
31. Exodus

IV. The Tower
32. Space Express
33. CORA
34. Vertigo
35. Starglider Plus Eighty
36. The Cruel Sky
37. The Billion-Ton Diamond

V. Ascension
38. A Place of Silent Storms
39. The Wounded Sun
40. The End of the Line
41. Meteor
42. Death in Orbit
43. Fail-Safe
44. A Cave in the Sky
45. The Man for the Job
46. Spider
47. Beyond the Aurora
48. Night at the Villa
49. A Bumpy Ride
50. The Falling Firefly
51. On the Porch
52. The Other Passenger
53. Fade-Out
54. Theory of Relativity
55. Hard Dock
56. View from Balcony
57. The Last Dawn

Epilogue: Kalidasa's Triumph

Afterword: Sources and Acknowledgments
Addition to the Afterword

==========================================

Let me start with a piece of advice for Clarke neophytes: don't make The Fountains of Paradise your first novel by this author. I have the audacity to claim that it is one of his finest, but it is also somewhat untypical as it combines science fiction and historical fiction; and the former, again untypically, is not linked to space travel, exploration or close encounters. That said, probably nothing terrible would happen if you do make this novel the first one by Arthur you have ever read. It's vintage Clarke, and if you don't like it, you will probably dislike his other novels as well.

While we are on the advice subject, let me give you another piece of it: avoid this Gollancz edition in the SF Masterworks series. Yes, the cover art is gorgeous, but the font is excruciatingly small and the quality of the printing is appallingly inferior.

The main scientific premise of the novel may at first glance seem utterly fantastic. Nay, ridiculous. Space elevator, indeed! Transporting passengers and goods from Earth's surface to Earth's orbit - the geostationary one, 36 000 km above! - very much on the principle of the ordinary elevator does sound ludicrous, doesn't it? Yet this staggering notion, Clarke argues convincingly in the fascinating Afterword, has already been discussed quite seriously by a number of scientists. And if it may just happen to work one day, it will certainly make space travel - at close range and not only - unbelievably cheap.

Much as it does sound like fantasy, the whole concept of the space elevator, as always with Arthur, is no fantasy at all, but science fiction par excellence. The concept doesn't violate any fundamental laws of nature, thus it is quite possible. The only problem is an engineering one. But it is a huge problem indeed, namely that material strong enough to build anything 36 000 km long just doesn't exist; only the diamond seems to come close but the necessary amounts are hardly available, and they would cost astronomic amount of money anyway. As it often happens, the solution is a simple one, at least in the novel: zero gravity conditions in Earth's orbit may enable the production of a material spatially so perfectly organised, namely so strong, that you can build something like - let Mr Morgan tell you:

"From the engineering point of view, a good analogy now would be the old Eiffel Tower - turned upside down and stretched a hundred thousand times."
"As much as that?"
"Just about."

Without doubt, Vannevar Morgan is one of Clarke's most compelling characters, a genuinely mad scientist of the subtlest kind. He is a brilliant engineer whose achievements, to say nothing of his ambitions, have long surpassed anything done by his idol (Isambard Brunel himself). Having just built the most stupendous bridge in human history - spanning the Strait of Gibraltar, no less - Morgan is clearly the right man to tackle something as monstrous as the Orbital Tower which should contain the space elevator. Psychologically, he is a fascinating, but rather chilling, combination of powerful intelligence, irresistible charm, superb cunning, and frightening ruthlessness. It is not often that you find in fiction a character who is, from different points of view, both so human and so inhuman at the same time; not the least impressive contribution to the latter is that the engineer has long since abjured the need of any human companionship, including feminine one. I find Morgan's independence of body and spirit positively inspiring, yet I am not a little disturbed by the intensity of his ambition which no obstacle can stop. In short, Vannevar Morgan is a tribute to Clarke's awe-inspiring powers of characterisation, especially considering the economy of his style. To give but one example about concise insight, here is the opening of Chapter 7:

Vannevar Morgan had not slept well, and that was most unusual. He had always taken pride in his self-awareness, and his insight into his own drives and emotions. If he could not sleep, he wanted to know why.

One of the negative consequences of Morgan's overwhelming personality is that he effectively overshadows everybody else; in other words, Clarke bothers little with description of the other characters. This is most reprehensible of course, but let me repeat again what I have said many times: Clarke's characters may be simple, but are they alive! You can meet here quite a bunch of colourful personalities, scantily drawn yet exciting. Among my favourites are a couple of Tibetan monks, one of whom just happens to be a "retired" physicist of considerable fame, author of the immortal phrase that now, after all world religions are effectively destroyed, we can at last pay serious attention to the concept of God. Another treasure of succinct character depiction is an Arab sheik whose extraordinary business acumen is coupled with a lot of common sense and a most awesome insight into the future, as solidly proved by his crucial participation in the building of the Gibraltar Brigde. Pretty good achievements for fellows who appear but a few times in the whole novel, and never stay for long at that.

In addition to shadowy secondary characters, the only other minor drawback of the novel is its rambling structure. To split his novels into numerous chapters is not unusual for Clarke, but he usually manages to unify them rather well. Not quite so well here. Several chapters in the first part are pure historical fiction, taking place at the very same place, but also taking you back to the fifth century AD; since the rest is set in the twenty-second century, it's quite a leap. These episodes are fascinating in themselves but they fit the whole picture rather awkwardly. This is also true for some of the other, "present", chapters, which may seem to jump from one incident to another without making much sense. Perfect example is the Starglider episode, mankind's first collision with a vastly advanced alien culture. But since it has some moments so stirring, I easily forgive its slightly incongruous place. My personal favourite is the devastating discussion about God.

2069 June 08 GMT 1537. Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to Earth.

''The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

''If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step of a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.''

The argument seems logically irrefutable to me. If we accept, as we must, that there is no really conclusive evidence about either the existence of God or lack of such, we are left with nothing but a theoretical concept about Him, developed by Us. This is obviously quite unnecessary, as any rational man with elementary scientific background would agree, and as William of Ockham observed quite some time ago. In his works of speculative non-fiction, which are every bit as daring and visionary as his fiction (if not more), Arthur has written a great deal about the enormous philosophical consequences of The First Contact. The Starglider episode from The Fountains of Paradise easily counts as one of his finest explorations of the same topic in fiction.

Since today is the World Day of the Unsolicited Advice, which I strenuously celebrate, I have another piece for the future readers of the novel. Read carefully even those seemingly unrelated to the story chapters, historical and not only. During the course of the novel they might just turn out to be not quite so irrelevant as they seem. This is true also of the many exceprts quoted here and there, mostly from books first published in the future, but sometimes going back to Dr Freud as well.

So much for the minor weaknesses of the novel. Its major strength alone - Vannevar Morgan himself - more than compensates for them. But there are several other bonuses as well.

For one thing, the story is absolutely amazing - and pretty though-provoking too. The beginning is a bit slow, with the aforementioned accent on historical digressions, but before one can realise it, Clarke weaves an intricate plot in which the science of the future goes hand in hand with the economics and the religions of the past. Quite apart from all that, the basic trend of the plot - the building of the space elevator - is brought to a great and breathtakingly dramatic climax. It is certainly worth noting, hopefully without spoilers, how Arthur artfully avoids an anti-climax. This he does in the very last chapter, a very short one like all others, which is set in the very distant future, when Morgan's beloved space elevator has led to results so stunning that even he could not possibly have predicted them.

Another delicious bonus is the educational value of the novel. Now, don't get me wrong. I do not read novels for information and I completely agree that a writer of fiction is fully justified in manipulating historical facts with as much license as his story requires. But Arthur is the kind of writer who peppers his works of fiction with very accurate historical details indeed. You wouldn't be surprised that the photo of Brunel described here, as well as his biography by Rolt mentioned, really do exist; indeed, both are rather famous. For my part, the most amazing historical discovery was the stupefying and completely unbelievable accident with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 (see the aptly titled Chapter 20). I thought Arthur was pulling my leg that such truly fantastic thing, not only happened, but was actually caught on film and has been regarded as one of the most sensational footage ever since. Well, it's true. The video's on YT. I've seen it dozens of times. And I still can't believe it.

Speaking of real foundations of fiction, the Afterword makes an absorbing read, too. As every great writer, Arthur always used the real life as his raw material. He set the novel in Taprobane, which is just another ancient name for Sri Lanka, as Milton well knew; his ''Paradise Regained'' is quoted in the Foreword. Just about the only changes that Arthur made were few alternative names and several minor geographical adjustments: he placed the island right on the Equator and he changed the height and the position of few of its mountains. Otherwise the rock fortress Yakkadala and the even more striking rock Sri Pada (Adam's Peak) do exist today (only the real name of the former is Sigiriya). If the next flight to Sri Lanka is fully booked, don't despair. Look into Wikipedia instead; plenty of pictures there. The lion gate, the endless stairs, the sensuous frescoes up there, the ominous shadow of the mountain in the early morning: it's all drawn from life, or from stone in most cases.

All in all, a stirring, beautifully written and wholly realistic (save the last chapter!) novel about everything that makes us human: ambition, achievement, vanity, religion, technology, superstition, and a lot more. No better way to finish this rambling by quoting the epigraph. Below a touching dedication to Leslie Ekanayake, one of Clarke's closest friends on Sri Lanka who had died in 1977 (less than two weeks before his 30th birthday), we read:

"Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality."

Sri Jawaharlal Nehru, to the Ceylon Association for the Advancement of Science, Colombo, 15 October 1962.*

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* See Clarke's short but shattering essay ''Science and Spirituality'', reprinted in the collection Voices from the Sky (1965), for further discussion of this remark. ( )

A brilliant but slightly obsessed engineer wants to build a space elevator using a new carbon-tube filament. The main problem is that the only suitable spot on the whole globe is on top of a sacred mountain on the island of Taprobane, and the Buddhist monks in the temple on the mountain top are unwilling to let it happen.

Hard SF, but with characters that are at least more than cardboard cutouts, and with the focus on social and financial snags rather than on the pure engineering. I also liked the two historical subplots: one dealing with usurper king Kalidasa's reign in the early 2nd century, another with the alien explorer probe in the late 21st. Possibly Clarke's last really good book (I was never a big fan of 2010, although I rather liked the movie; 2061 was mediocre; I never bothered with 3001, and most of what he wrote with Gentry Lee was rather lacklustre). ( )