Look on my works, ye mighty

Review of The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (London: Gollancz, 1979). 256 pp. Hardcover.

Two thousand years ago, King Khalidasa of Taprobane (a fictional version of Sri Lanka), wanting to make a name for himself, built a paradise around his rock fortress atop the monolith Yakkagala. Pleasure gardens surround the rock and frescoes of a hundred beautiful women adorn its sides. Huge, gravity-fed fountains at the foot of Yakkagala are Khalidasa's crowning achievement: a sight never seen before on Taprobane.

In the 22nd century, engineer Vannevar Morgan also wants to make a name for himself. His previous achievement, a massive bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar, is unprecedented. But he's set his sights even higher, literally: now he wants to build the ultimate bridge, an Orbital Tower stretching from earth into orbit. There's only one suitable location for the tower: the summit of Sri Kanda on Taprobane. The problem is that there is a Buddhist monastery on the mountain, they have title to the land in perpetuity, and they don't want to give it up.

The Fountains of Paradise is the first novel to introduce the "space elevator." If you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's more or less exactly what it sounds like: a gigantic tower tethered to the earth at one end, and to a satellite in geostationary orbit at the other end, 36,000 kilometers up. Theoretically, a space elevator can transport material and people into space at a fraction of the cost of spacecraft. Practically, however, it's an impossibility, since no available material is strong enough to build one. It would take something like Clarke's fictional "hyperfilament," an extremely strong diamond fibre that is so thin it can't be seen.

By coincidence, a novel published only a few months later, Charles Sheffield's The Web Between the Worlds, also featured a space elevator and has a very similar story. Clarke was aware of the novel before it was published, and in a 1979 open letter to the Science Fiction Writers of America, he warded off accusations of plagiarism—the space-elevator concept was "an idea whose time has come," he said—and expressed surprise that another author hadn't used it already, since it had been around for at least 20 years.

Compared to the other two of the "Big Three," Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, I have read relatively little of Arthur C. Clarke's work: by my count, eight novels and a few collections of short stories, far fewer than either of Heinlein's or Asimov's books. I discovered all three just prior to high school. The Fountains of Paradise sat in the stacks at my public library, and I just never picked it up. Forty years later, I find that I'm still quite fond of Asimov and Heinlein, but for some reason, not Clarke. I noted in my review of Rendezvous with Rama two years ago that I seem to have outgrown him.

The first act works very well, paralleling Khalidasa's hubristic ambition with Morgan's more noble, but nonetheless impressive, feats. There's a major crisis at the climax of the book, which is solved through sound thinking and good engineering. If you recall the Apollo 13 accident in 1970 (or have read Gene Kranz's account of it in Failure is Not an Option), it has much the same flavour: when disaster strikes, can-do engineering and creative thinking, rather than heroics, save the day.

The conflict with the Buddhist monks. on the other hand, isn't resolved. Rather, it's rendered moot by happenstance. This is a less satisfactory plot element.

A third subplot involves humanity's first contact with extraterrestrials. In 2069, about a century earlier than the main plot, an automated probe dubbed the Starglider enters the solar system. Its purpose is to make contact with other civilizations and send data back to its distant home world. Starglider possesses a sophisticated AI that allows it to hold conversations and analyze information. When someone uploads the Summa Theologia, within an hour Starglider has declared Thomas Aquinas to be "sense-free random noise" and the concept of God unnecessary.

Here we find two staple tropes of Clarke's novels: an encounter with (generally) unseen but technologically superior and enlightened aliens, and the glib handwaving-away of God-talk that follows. Clarke didn't believe in God, but his novels are full of Alien Saviours who perform the same function. Someone uploads Aquinas into an Alien Saviour software application, and "billions of words of pious gibberish" are rendered obsolete, apparently with no objection from the pious. Just like that. Clarke had used this same plot element earlier, in Childhood's End, in which the Alien Saviours' infinite wisdom also causes the traditional religions to collapse. It's an infuriating trope: Clarke was a brilliant man, but his atheism, it seems, was maintained with a dime store's worth of understanding of religious philosophy. The Alien Saviours are author surrogates. They're no more enlightened than the author.

Nonetheless, The Fountains of Paradise is an important read for its place in science-fiction history. When it comes to the politics and conflics associated with the ownership or use of a space elevator, I think Kim Stanley Robinson did a better job in Red Mars. But he didn't do it first. Clarke did, and hence this novel is a hard-SF landmark.