I found The Fountains of Paradise, a 1978 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, a mixed bag o’ nuts. I must confess I expected quite a different novel based on the back page “summary” and the blurb on the cover page. I hate it when that happens (though I understand this is just the publisher’s attempt to solely sell more units). Frankly, I think the book I anticipated I would be reading would have been much better.
But I don’t want to trash the work. Even though it’s not the greatest thing I’ve read, being a Clarkian story, it’s still better than ninety percent of the genre. From the view point of pure hard-SF creativity, Clarke is rarely topped. Perhaps by the chemist-writer Hal Clement, or the physicist-writer Poul Anderson, or the jack-of-all-trades-writer Frederik Pohl. Anyway, the creator/discoverer/inventor of the geostationary satellite has now championed another ingenious mode of transportation to the stars, though one he himself has not created nor discovered nor invented.
The centerpiece of the novel is the space elevator. Imagine this: a tower anchored on the equator, built straight up thirty-thousand kilometers, connecting to a satellite-station in geosynchronous earth orbit. A stationary tower that tall. Or, if you think about it, it’s a bridge. A bridge to earth orbit. The primary advantage would be lowering the cost of payload expense. Every pound you want to launch into orbit, with the ultimate goal of either staying in orbit or leaving for the moon or other bodies in outer space, costs you X amount in astronomical fuel costs. With the space elevator, this X amount is eventually reduced down to a fraction of the cost. The novel is filled with details – quite interesting, I have to say, and obviously impeccably researched – and the minutiae of how it would work, how it could be constructed, and how it finally is built.
Most of the work takes place at the end of the 22nd century, following our intrepid engineer as he overcomes obstacles to build his Great Work, with periodic flashes back two millennia prior describing the reign of a brutal Buddhist king. The cover would have you believe that the two men are related somehow, or even ultimately work together somehow. That would be a story. But no. I’m not quite sure why Clarke includes the chapters of the ancient past, as the book has a distinct anti-religious tone to it. The remaining monks are booted off their temple to make way for the elevator. The whole point was lost on me.
Apparently, mankind has encountered a race of aliens in the form of an artificially-intelligent space probe. I often find that Clarke’s empathy and interest with alien races is more pronounced than that with his one-dimensional characters. The Starholmers, as they are called here, make a cameo at the end of the novel, and it’s possibly the best chapter of the book. A whole work based on those beings and their society, or a work where they play a more prominent role, also would have been better. And to continue with the anti-religious vibe, the Starholmer probe “deconstructs” the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas one hour after a group of earthbound philosophers beam it up to it. Okay …
Though I snarked that the characters are pointlike in their dimensionality, the death of one of the major characters took on a surprisingly touching quality. The man can write very, very … humanely, I suppose, when it suits his objective. But then he throws in extremely clichéd caricatures, such as the bossy, ballsy, plays-with-the-big-boys older newslady. And a potentially fascinating character, a brilliant and iconoclastic physicist and Jewish-convert to Buddhism, is thrown away, underdeveloped.
I’d take value in The Fountains of Paradise from a strict hard-science angle. That category gets graded A+, everything else, a D, so the book averages to about, oh, let’s say a B-. The best thing I ever read by Clarke is still Rendezvous with Rama. That book absolutely captured my imagination and held it viselike for two weeks one summer many years ago. Think I’ll hunt that one down next trip to the old book store …
See here for my short post on the death of Arthur C. Clarke.
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