A review by nwhyte
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/founp.htm[return][return]In the late 1970s, in this, the third book in a series of three for which he had reputedly received the largest advance ever paid to a science fiction author, Clarke developed a grand scale extension of his communications satellite: the space elevator, skyhook, or beanstalk, a tower thousands of kilometres in height, fixed to the earth's surface, that can be used to ship freight and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of a rocket.[return][return]Great minds think alike. The book came out within months of a similarly themed book by Charles Sheffield, The Web Between the Worlds. They make an interesting pair. Sheffield's book has everything - young hero overcoming a disability; attractive girl with drug-addict mother; obsessed millionnaire in orbit with his mad scientist sidekick; oh yes, and the actual construction of the space elevator itself, built in space but attached to the Earth by an implausibly risky manoeuvre. Clarke's book is much less rushed. He gives us the idea of the orbital elevator and the story of its construction, against a rich background that adds to the main theme rather than distracting.[return][return]One aspect of that richness is the very name of the central character, Vannevar Morgan. "Vannevar" is clearly Clarke's homage to Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), not just a famous inventor in his own right but the man who successfully linked state and science during WW2 under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and who these days is often mentioned as a spiritual godfather of hypertext due to his 1945 essay As We May Think (published the same year as Clarke's own "Extra-Terrestrial Relays"). I am sure that "Morgan" is also intended as a tribute, but to whom? One attractive possibility is Garrett A. Morgan (1877-1963), African-American inventor of the gas mask and the traffic light. But given the circumstances, it seems more likely that the reference is to a man who, like Vannevar Bush, was appointed by FDR to head a massive project of state investment in applied science (though with more of an engineering bent), Arthur E. Morgan (1878-1975), the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who (like Vannevar Morgan in the novel) was eventually relieved of his responsibilities for largely political reasons.[return][return]Clarke's characterisation is not always his strong point (indeed Vannevar Morgan remains rather a cipher who seems to have regretted losing his childhood kite more than his girlfriend), but this book contains some of the most interesting personalities in his oeuvre. Johan Olivier de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe, the viewpoint character of the first few chapters set in the near-future time of the bridge's construction, is a former senior UN official retired to the island of Taprobane (the slightly altered Sri Lanka where the book is set). Rajasinghe is at least partly based on reality. But he also of course represents Clarke's own aspirations for a peaceful retirement and dignified acceptance of old age on the island he loves. The author had just entered his seventh decade, and had just lost his "only perfect friend of a lifetime" (to whom the book is dedicated) in a motorbike accident, so his reflections on mortality are understandable. It is comforting to reflect that, almost a quarter of a cenury on, he apparently enjoys the same comforts he had imagined for Rajasinghe.[return][return]Rather more intriguing, though sketched in less detail, is the brilliant mathematician Choam Goldberg, who when we first encounter him has joined a Buddhist monastery and been renamed the Venerable Parakarma. The epigraph to the book as a whole is a quotation from Sri Jawaharlal Nehru, "Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality." Goldberg/Parakarma looks at first like he may turn out to be an embodiment of the author's often expressed desire to explore both science and spirituality. But in fact it becomes clear that he represents (to use a phrase introduced to science fiction in 1977) "the dark side of the force". He becomes obsessed with protecting the monastery against Morgan's plans to build the space elevator on its mountain, even after suffering a spiritual crisis and leaving the order; he then sabotages a weather-generating satellite in order to try and wreck one of Morgan's publicity stunts, but with the unexpected result that the change in wind direction floods the monastery's mountain top with the butterflies whose arrival has long been prophesied to inevitably mean the monks' departure.[return][return]Most memorable of all - I think the most intriguing artificial intelligence in Clarke's fiction, including HAL - is the Starglider. Many of Clarke's novels have as main or subsidiary theme humanity's contact with an elder, more spiritually developed race. In The Fountains of Paradise the means of contact is the alien probe Starglider, which decades before the time the main part of the novel is set has swept through the solar system and used the brute force of scientific logic to disprove Thomas Aquinas and thus abolish religion, generating Clarke's favourite humanist utopia setting before the story even begins. Of course it is absurd to imagine that the world's religions, Buddhism apart, would ever "vanish in a puff of logic" (as Douglas Adams put it in 1978), but this is a point where we readers have to suspend our disbelief and enjoy Starglider's dissection of its (voiceless) opponents.[return][return]There's much more to write about here - Mars, the historical tale of Kalidasa, the role of sunspots - but will have to leave it here for now.