An excellent speculative story, one of the first of its kind to discuss in detail the idea of a space elevator. This is about the location and building of the first one and what it means to the Earth. Very good stuff. ( )

(Alistair) And now, back on to my regular booklogging schedule with The Fountains of Paradise, as my reading list return to some classic SF - published 1979.

As I'm fairly certain my readers already know, or will know as soon as they look at the cover picture Amazon obligingly provides to my left, the principal plot of The Fountains of Paradise is the construction of a space elevator, the Orbital Tower. (I add that this is almost enough to sell it to me on its own - the book is set in a Heroic Engineering Future, as one can see when one learns that the chief architect of the elevator's previous project was the bridge that spans Gibraltar, and I always did have a soft spot for the Heroic Engineering Future.)

This is intercut by two other closely related plot threads; one in the past, concerning the relationship between the order of monks whose monastery in the present occupies the equatorial mountain from which the elevator must rise1 and the historical king, Kalidasa, who had previously clashed with them about his own wonder of engineering, a mountain palace whose gardens contained the other eponymous "Fountains of Paradise", which effectively parallels the main plot; and a second concerning a robot space probe passing through the solar system - and the effects of its passage on human religiosity, after it obligingly provides a logical analysis of said religiosity after the University of Chicago transmitted to it the whole of the Summa Theologica. As one might also metatextually expect, it does not approve. While entertaining to the atheistically inclined, the easy resolution of this plot thread seems perhaps a little implausible in the light of observable human behavior, but, well, it is a much lesser part of the book than the saga of the Orbital Tower, and thus can readily be forgiven.

A nice, solid piece of classic SF. Recommended.

1. "Taprobane", the setting for the book, is essentially the then Ceylon and now Sri Lanka displaced south sufficiently to make it possess such a mountain.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... ) ( )

All I can say is Wow! Arthur C. Clark's vision is fascinating. He was brilliant and through his writing has very likely shown us our future. ( )

I'm not a huge Clarke fan, but I think this is one of his better efforts...perhaps the last good one he wrote as the books from his later years simply don't have much to recommend them.

This is a 'techno' book in the sense that character development is not strong point of the story, but then, I think that is fairly typical Clarke. He focuses on the technical aspects of his stories, in this case an Earth-to-orbit elevator, often at the expense of his cast.

One of the things that makes reading Clarke enjoyable is his technical vision—while science fiction, it usually does not seem so beyond reality that we cannot conceive of it happening. He is often cited as the inventor of the concept of Telstar based upon his Ascent to Orbit. This is, perhaps, unfair to some earlier authors who used geosynchronous space stations for communications, but there's no doubting that Clarke had a very good eye for a novel science idea. This gives me, at least, a comfortable sense of peering into the near future rather than somewhere around the year 50,000. He's done something of the same in this book, putting forth an idea in the late 1970s that has become fairly standard fare in science fiction today.

If you like Clarke's writing style, then this is a recommended read. ( )

One of the first "adult" SF novels I ever read, (probably age 10 or so), and personally memorable for that reason alone. Apart from that, it's a cracking story. ( )