Book review: The Fountain of Paradise

The construction of a space elevator.

This novel, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1979, is widely considered a masterpiece and is justly famous for popularizing the concept of the space elevator.

A space elevator is, to put it briefly, a literal elevator which goes along a cable from the surface all the way up to the satellites. For very complicated reasons this futuristic contraption would be much less expensive than our traditional rockets and therefore could make space colonization economically sound.

Clarke is maybe the archetypal hard sci-fi author and here he manages not only to be clear in all the fairly complicated explanations, he entertains while doing it. This is a much harder thing to pull off.

Sadly he fails on the various sub plotting. While the construction of the elevator is very engaging he tries to build a plot about science versus faith. Now there is nothing bad on the concept, the problem starts where Clarke basically cheats and eschews any meaningful confrontation between the two.

Orson Scott Card smartly noted how the vast majority of Sci-Fi creations are atheist world and here it’s not an exception. Of course Clarke can make whatever side he wants the winner but when one is side is just full of craziness then it becomes not very subtle propaganda.

He introduces other various sub plots without following any of them trough. The overall impression is that Clarke was rightly enamored with the idea of the elevator but feared that without more narrative stuff the book would have been too boring.

As it is the book is oddly disjointed, still very well written and deserving a place in any sci-fi lover library but sadly it’s not the masterpiece that it ought to be.