The Fountains of Paradise

"Yeah, this is a really interesting one. I think in his later novels – like Imperial Earth , which Mike Stack writes brilliantly about in Rendezvous – Clarke does feel a greater amount of licence, and becomes a bit more playful in his writing. In The Fountains of Paradise we have the story of Vannevar Morgan, who is – again – the engineer figure. He’s hoping to build a tower that will link to a geostationary satellite for space travel – we’ll be able to zoom people up to the satellite in this kind of space elevator. I think it’s very literary, without being self-consciously literary. I tend to think of a play by Ibsen, The Master Builder: the story of a great architect who, in his later days, looks back on his life and discovers disillusionment. Whereas in Clarke’s story, we have a story about somebody who leaves a legacy – there’s almost a revising of Ibsen going on there. That’s totally speculative, but it feels like it to me. Morgan wants to build this space elevator in a country that is almost certainly Sri Lanka, though it’s not called Sri Lanka in the novel. But no, he can’t build there because it’s a sacred area. We have, again, a Buddhist monk. He objects – and Morgan respects that, interestingly. He does get to build a space elevator on Mars instead, a smaller one, with the same sort of effect. Around the story, though – and this is interesting, even though it’s not revolutionary – there are two framing stories. Clarke is interested in how we frame stories – again, from late Victorian or Edwardian short story practice. He’s not as crafty as, say, Kipling; but there’s still something going on there. There’s a frame narrative involving an ancient king, King Kalidasa – it’s based on a true historical figure, and his ambitions to build a pleasure garden. So we have a mirroring: the building of the space elevator and the building of the pleasure garden. And then we jump forward at the end of the story to another frame narrative, which is about the post-apocalyptic Earth. It’s become an icy wasteland – it’s the 1970s, so there are these ideas are about the next Ice Age. Clarke was very much wrapped up in ecological concerns, and that comes through in this last third of the novel. Aliens come to visit this now-barren wasteland, and of course, they discover the legacies of Vannevar Morgan: six space elevators. There’s an echo of Shelley’s poem ‘ Ozymandias ,’ where the poem ends with a ruined statue and says: Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! – and there’s just rubble and wreckage. In Clarke’s version, the pleasure garden doesn’t survive, but the space elevators do – they may not be working, but they survive as mysterious artefacts. The aliens have to speculate upon the meaning of these structures. Clarke isn’t doing anything radically revolutionary here as a writer. But he comes up with a really interesting series of perspectives and comparisons and contrasts in the course of this narrative. I think it’s very well worth reading that novel."