The Fountains Of Paradise (S.F. MASTERWORKS) [Kindle Edition]

I have read a few of A.C. Clarke's works now and unfortunately, for me at least, this isn't the best. Without spoiling the plot itself it's a well written account of how a space elevator would be constructed, woven around the ambitions of the central character. It's set in Clarke's take on Sri Lanka (which he expounds well at the end of the book) and as usual he counjours up his colourful and well furnished mental tapestries brilliantly. The only real problems for me were firstly that the central character, while not lacking depth, very much lacked likeability. This is always important for me in this type of fairly hard science sci-fi. Obviously this is just personal taste, though. The second problem and one that is not Clarke's fault is that I have only recently finished Green Mars, the second installment in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Again this is a fairly hard science story but written in the earliy 90's much later than this. The first book (Red Mars) also includes an in depth account of space elevator construction and is obviously influenced by Clarke's work. This is not Clarke's fualt but my own. I've just had a belly full of the concept for now. I can fully inderstand how so many people can love this book. At the time it was written it was groundbreaking and if you haven't read much Clarke or sci-fi then you will probably love this. Don't let this review put you off anyway as this may be your cup of tea. It is certainly worth the reading effort and a must for the hardcore Clarke fan also. Personally, though, I preferred The City And The Stars.

I love this book. It's a perfect demonstration that a novel can be exciting and enjoyable despite having no have detailed characters and not even a real plot. The book tells the tale of the building of a space elevator; characters appear and disappear and are purely functional; and Clarke describes events because they're interesting, not because they're 'essential' to the story. There's a brilliant passage about an alien space probe passing through the solar system, which has no relevance at all to the story, and yet is beautiful and engaging in its own right. What a strange, intriguing and amazing book. I read it when I was ten and I've never forgotten it.

One of Clarke's running themes is that of Human Transcendence, a racial coming-of-age or puberty, during which we throw off the shackles of our irrational beliefs and, well, grow up.
'Childhood's End' saw the human race guided through this process by an ELDER RACE, while in '2001: A Space Oddity', a single human is transformed by an ELDER RACE and returned to Earth to do much the same thing. 'Fountains of Paradise' is as joyous as the aforementioned books and thought of by many as Clarke's best work.
The story follows engineer Vandevaar Morgan and his quest to build a space-elevator (see also Charles Sheffield's 'Web Between the Worlds' and Robinson's 'Red Mars'. Robinson named the termini of the elevator 'Clarke' and 'Sheffield' as a tribute to the authors of the earlier books) anchored on Earth on the equatorial island of Taprobane (based on Clarke's home of Sri Lanka).
It's interesting to note that in 1979 Clarke's boundless optimism leads him to believe that major religions will fall into decline. By the end of the book the Vatican is mentioned, in passing, as being virtually bankrupt.
Indeed, the concept of God is dealt a final lethal blow by information from a passing alien AI (representative of the obligatory ELDER RACE) which reduces religion to an aberrant condition common only to mammalian intelligent species and generally abandoned by those races at a particular level of social and scientific development. Clarke also presents no argument against the destruction of a millennia-old Buddhist monastery to make way for his space-elevator, which (a minor complaint) slightly detracts from his sound points about Mankind's immaturity with regard to organised religion, and seems at odds with the respect for history and tradition, which is shown to great effect elsewhere in the novel.
Sadly, with the events of September 11, 2001, his optimistic prediction of a world freed from the chains of religious belief now seem rather naive, as much as we would like to share in his hope for a rational future.
The narrative, initially, is sandwiched with the tale of King Kalidasa, who, two thousand years previously, created his own challenge to Heaven with the fabulous Palace of Yakkigala.
The brilliance of the book lies in the way Clarke takes a solid scientifically-provable principle and creates the reality of its potential for us. It is very likely that at some point in the future such a structure will be built.
It's an exciting and exhilarating thought, made all the more engrossing by Clarke's mastery of storytelling, the vividness of the setting, the attention to detail and the undoubted (for its time anyway) scientific accuracy.