Pros: Interesting ideas, authoritative delivery, timely right now.
Cons: Slow. Dry. At times, arrogant.
The Bottom Line: Read this book for a thorough look at a technological marvel we have yet to build, but perhaps could! Lots of ideas, but suffering from a slow plotline.
snpmurray's Full Review: Arthur Charles Clarke - Fountains of Paradise
Timely reading, this was.
Shortly after I began reading “Fountains of Paradise” the second space shuttle was lost with all hands over North America. Much was made in the media at the time of the fact that the space shuttle had never really served the purpose for which it was created, a cheap reusable vehicle making frequent inexpensive trips to the orbit of Earth. Instead, it makes infrequent expensive trips, and is reusable only in part.
Imagine my interest then to discover that the subject of Fountains of Paradise is nothing other than a viable alternative solution to the problem, and one which seems mind-bogglingly improbable at first sight!
In this novel Arthur C Clarke, author, engineer, visionary, and inventor of the communications satellite tells the tale of the building of a great space elevator.
Space elevator?
If you live in the same world I do, your first thought upon reading what I just said would be that the tale was completely fantastic. So I also thought. But apparently not.
I confess, when I first realized what this book was quite soberly proposing, I had visions of Roald Dahl, and the tale of the great glass elevator, my mind began to play reruns of “The First Men in the Moon”, so ridiculous does it sound at first hearing.
The idea is thus: filaments of carbon are manufactured in zero-gravity to produce a “rope” of strength similar to diamond. A number of these ropes are secured to a satellite orbiting the Earth at a fixed location. The ropes are then lowered down to the ground (in what would obviously have, by then, become a no-fly zone!) and are secured to the Earth. To this tether, you attach whatever simple propulsion device you like, battery power would work fine, add a small carriage not dissimilar to a high altitude balloon capsule, and there you have it....a space elevator!
You may be interested to learn that Clarke’s impressive list of real-life references at the end of the novel indicate that the engineering challenges involved are not nearly as insurmountable as you might imagine. The space elevator is extremely difficult to create, but it is not impossible.
Clarke sets his novel in the fictional nation of Taprobane, which is Sri-lanka plus or minus a few handfuls of artistic license. Positioned on the equator, with a stable climate and a sufficiently massive mountain to secure the elevator to, it is the best choice as Earth-station. Engineer Vannevar Morgan heads up the project, and must first convince the inhabitants of Taprobane, including the exquisitely indifferent monks who currently inhabit his chosen mountain, that the project is realistic and worth their moving along for. It is not difficult to perceive that any such project in our future would meet just such challenges, and Clarke illuminates the many different interests and values that would clash with believability.
As is typical for Clarke, the characterizations are sketchily drawn in this novel. His main characters are iconoclastic, little more than archetypes for the interest or field of expertise they represent. Having said this, little is to be gained by describing the persons of the book, and it suffices to say that we deal with the engineer, his assistant, the monk, the scientist-cum-monk, the intrepid reporter, and the friendly interested third party observer.
This cast is all the material Clarke needs to pass all the commentary on such a project that he considers necessary. Clarke clearly has a number of things to say regarding the issues surrounding any such project, and these are covered at some depth in Fountains of paradise.
Firstly, this book spends a good deal of time discussing God. Or perhaps, more accurately, the conspicuous absence of God. This book is pro-atheist in stance, and whilst the author takes time to acknowledge the value of spirituality, he also infuses the pages of this book with the message that belief in God is mental aberration. Whilst I can appreciate this may be Mr Clarkes point of view, it has always been my personal belief that failure to understand faith is a greater aberration than faith could ever be. I was left with something of a bad taste from the flavor of Mr Clarke’s thinly veiled disdain for those who hold to a dogma. It is a pity that his visionary gift has failed to enlighten him regarding true respect for faith. This lets down the book.
Clarke also spends a lot of time in this book discussing something which is of course always an issue in space: safety.
Again, this seemed of enormous immediate relevance as I read the book, and I know that the astronauts lost to us so recently, and their families and friends beside would share the view Clarke advocates here. Clarke points out that no large engineering project is ever without its fatalities, its tragedies, its human errors, large and small. Throughout the book Clarke comes at the issue of safety from different angles, but always the message is the same: Let the fantastic journey of mankind be peopled by, to borrow a quote, a coalition of the willing. If everyone involved can accept the risk, and keep the risk to others to a scarce minimum, the inevitable tragedies as we move forwards (and upwards in this case) are worth the risk.
Having said that, apparently the space elevator would be a lot safer than you might imagine!
As is again typical of Clarke, this book is littered here and there with short monologues, disguised as chapters on any number of fascinating asides regarding space, engineering, and anything else which Clarke has thoughts on. Watch out in this particular volume for interesting ditties on engineering disasters, weather, the discovery of Earths atmosphere, vertigo, and the aurora borealis to name a few! I love these little monologues, I always come away from Clarke books full of interesting but ostensibly useless facts!
This novel is a slow starter, and never really gets up too much head of steam, tension-wise. Towards the end of the book is the only event which we might consider a “crisis” in the whole work. Even this event is hardly white-knuckle material, and the book could definitely have benefited from feeling like it was going somewhere a lot sooner, and a lot stronger. This is a definite negative. It is really only when one is a quarter through the book that the project to build the elevator is truly underway. I confess that up until that point I wasn't sure what the heck the point was meant to be. If I wanted to wander in the darkness I’d go back to reading Umberto Ecco!
All in all then, lots of interesting things to say, but only really wrapped up into a lukewarm story. If you like Clarke, or find these ideas interesting, you’ll like it. If not, I suspect you’d find it more trouble than it was worth.
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