THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in the year it was published. Unfortunately, while the novel will still appeal to a reader who looks for a particular technologically based style of science fiction novel, on the whole, it hasn’t aged particularly well. In some ways, it feels like three stories stitched together without adequate combining of the disparate portions.

The major portion of the novel is set in the twenty-second century. Engineer Vannervar Morgan, fresh from building a bridge across the Straits of Gibraltar, has determined that technology has caught up to the theories of twentieth century scientist Yuri N. Artsutanov (b.1929), who first suggested a space elevator in 1960. Although Morgan will face some technological hurdles in getting his space elevator built, his primary challenges will be political and financial. Clarke has created the fictional country Taprobane, based on Sri Lanka, and located it on the equator to make it a more desirable location for the elevator.

The novel opens with a look at Taprobane’s ancient, and practically mythical history, when Prince Kalidasa usurped the throne from his older brother and father and built a palace on Yakkagala. Kalidasa’s reign throws a shadow over Taprobane’s society which last more than two thousand years. Atop another mountain, Sri Kanda, the Buddhists have built a monastery. Naturally, this ancient holy place is the only spot on earth that Morgan believes is appropriate to build the terrestrial terminus of the space elevator. While Clarke shows the Buddhist monks as devout, he also portrays the world of the 22nd century as post-religious, a theme he would return to again and again. The Buddhists and Christians in The Fountains of Paradise treat their religion more as a philosophical worldview that a religious one.

Morgan must figure out how to convince the Buddhists to allow him to build his elevator on one of their most holy sites. At the same time, he needs to raise vast amounts of money from skeptical governments to finance the proposal. Naturally, he is able to overcome all these issues, although Clarke does introduce a certain amount of deus ex machina to deal with the Buddhist issue. That only leaves a technological struggle, which, unfortunately, was telegraphed early in the novel simply because the traditions of narrative required the technical failure to occur.

The third story that appears in The Fountains of Paradise is the arrival of a automated spaceship from a distant and ancient civilization. Much like the spaceship in Rendezvous with Rama, which Clarke published in 1973, the Starglider simply passes through the solar system without stopping at any of the planets along its route. Unlike the earlier spaceship, the Starglider interacts with humanity, sending them information and receiving information, not only welcoming humanity into the galactic society, but providing a way for humans to lift themselves up, although it is unclear how much humans have really taken advantage of this in the 80 years between the Starglider’s appearance and Morgan’s attempt to build his space elevator.

While The Fountains of Paradise seems slight and even trivial when read in 2018, it is clear why Clarke’s use of technology mixed with the ancient history and an alien spaceship appealed to the contemporary readers and award voters. Clarke took a theoretical scientific concept and explored how to make it a reality, even if that meant waiting two centuries for materials to catch up to Artsutanov’s proposal.

Return to

Thanks to for webspace.