The Fountains Of Paradise (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
I was disappointed in this book, though I confess that part of it is my fault. Clarke didn't tell the story that I wanted him to tell, and this is always an unfair expectation on the part of the reader. "If you want a particular story, you should write it yourself." is the rightful reply of the writer. But I'm only human, and when I get figs when I was expecting chocolate, I'm disappointed (even if I like figs, which I do).'The Fountains of Paradise' is about mankind's first attempt to construct a space elevator. It would perhaps be more precise to say that it is about one man's attempt to construct a space elevator, as Clarke suffers from his usual failing of trying to tell grand world transforming stories from the viewpoint of a single individual who has limited social interaction. The result is that the largest enterprise ever undertaken by man is made to feel like it's a small business with perhaps five employees.But that would not have particularly disappointed me had not the whole matter been made to seem so easy. One of my particular and growing pet peeves is science fiction that makes the conquest of space seem like it ought to be a trivial matter. I'm increasingly of the conviction that science fiction - which had been and ought to still be at the forefront of encouraging us to set our sights on the heavens, grow up, and leave the nest - is instead becoming a hindrance to us. We are increasingly becoming content with shoddy poorly realized visions of the stars that serve to make the real painful and difficult work of space exploration seem just that much less attractive. In the stories, it is always so easy. We flit across the unimaginable gulfs between stars not with the comparative ease with which we crossed the oceans (much less a real sense of the difficulty involved), but with the ease that we drive down to the corner convenience store. If it seems hard to get from here to there, we find alien artifacts that do the hard work for us. If we despair at our ability to cope, well then we are uplifted from our ignorance by passing benevolent alien patrons. We break the laws of physics with the power of plot, and we settle into the easy fantasies of human hubris rather than face up to the immensity of Old Man Space with some sort of maturity.Part of the problem is that only the last one third of the book actually concerns the construction of the space elevator. By the time the construction of the space elevator is really joined, its completion is a foregone conclusion and the great problems are dispensed with off stage in favor of smaller scale and more personnel tragedies and triumphs. It is as if the project the artist has conceived is too grand of scale for his imagination, and so he deals with something that isn't. The result ends up seeming less grand than even, for example, the story of the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.(For example.)But the biggest disappointment is that the first two thirds of the book don't deal directly with the construction of the tower at all, but instead deal with the protagonist's struggle to obtain permission to build the space elevator on land currently occupied by an unwilling Buddhist monastery. This part of the story is more engaging than the last third but ultimately Clarke forces it to resolve down to just another story about the supposed conflict between reason and faith. Despite the fact that these first 200 pages have the structure of a good 20 page short story, they would make for pretty good reading in Clarke's capable hands except that in the midst of this he finds himself unable to avoid picking up the trite hammer to nail his point home.Given how I've already confessed that I hoped this would be the story of the titanic struggle to conquer near space, you can perhaps imagine my dismay when Clarke trots out that most tired of easy sci-fi escapes - the Alien Messiah. Interspersed with this conflict between reason and faith in the form of the passively truculent monks standing in the way of human progress, Clarke adds an utterly unnecessary plot element of an alien visitor who is made to represent the last word in this metaconflict. Exactly why Clarke thought the story was well served by such a ham-handed device, I'm not sure because without it I think the story and the conflict is more thought provoking and its precise meaning more difficult to tease out. I will grant that as Alien Messiah's go this one is pretty original and well disguised. Instead of an actual alien, it's the AI of survey probe of alien manufacture. And it does not in fact bequeath the usual super-science on the otherwise helpless mankind and thereby usher in an age of peace, abundance, and justice. However, other than that it's a pretty typical Alien Messiah that saves mankind from itself and I was hoping at the outset that we could perhaps for once have a story without the intervention of a super-alien at all.In this case, the salvation takes the form of eliminating all religions from the Earth. Instead of bestowing on mankind the usual technological wisdom, it dispences philosophy.I kid you not. Arthur C. Clarke - avowed atheist - imagines an alien from on high come to Earth and pronounce in its irrefutable superhuman wisdom, that Arthur C. Clarke has been right all along and all religions are hooey. Now who could have guessed that twist? It's such a jarringly humorous and incongruous episode in the middle of the rest of the story that I really didn't know what to make of it. Is Clarke trying to be nasty here? Or, is he trying to make a joke? Is he convincing himself, or does he have some motive for deliberately advancing an extremely weak argument involving among other things the misuse of Ockham's razor, a failure to really consider the different role of infinite and finite numbers, a red herring, and a failure to consider the cosmological and theological import of the big bang?Whatever Clarke's larger intent, within the setting Clarke's technological prophet is taken with such seriousness that we are told virtually all religious belief ceases and human spiritual activity reaches an atheistic eschaton. Just like that, a new age dawns. Exactly why the unambiguous refutation of Thomas Aquinas would accomplish this is not really addressed, but for me as a computer scientist it does raise an interesting question of the presumed sophont class of the probe in question that it was able in under an hour to exceed the mental activities of "billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries." That is a god-like intelligence indeed! As Clarke puts it, "For the first time we knew what we'd always suspected, that ours was not the only intelligence in the universe, and that out among the stars were far older and perhaps far wiser civilizations."And if Clarke's imaginary alien probe doesn't convince you that super-wise aliens will come along and usher in paradise on this Earth, well just what would? When I started the book I was most afraid I would be annoyed with the rampant use of unobtanium and handwavium in the construction of the space elevator. Little did I realize that the unobtainium in the elevator filaments would pale in comparison to the unobtainium in the philosophical constructs. Still, for all that Clarke's digressions may annoy (or may stimulate depending on your philosophical inclinations), the first two thirds is still a good story. It's so good that when Clarke wraps this first story arc up, the remaining novel seems anticlimactic. The first part is so much better and more fully conceived that it as if the second shorter story arc is tacked on to fill out the story to a more respectable length. Much as I wanted the story to be about the second part, Clarke didn't seem to know what to do with it. So, in the end I got a good story, but it was far from the one that I wanted.
The fountains of paradise, Arthur C. ClarkeCharacters: Vannemar MorgaAbstracts: Vannemar Morgan's dream of linking Earth with the stars requires a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems.عنوان یک: چشمههای بهشت، رمان علمی – تخیلی / آرتور سی. کلارک، ترجمه: محمد قصاع، نشر: تهران، نشر افق، چاپ نخست سال 1357، این چاپ ۱۳۸۰، در 309 ص.، فروست: مجموعه آثار علمی - تخیلی، ۱۰، شابک: ایکس964674222، عنوان دیگر: فوارههای بهشتداستانی تخیلی از «آرتور سی. کلارک»، که سه دورهی زمانی را شامل میشود. در فصلهای نخستین از کتاب، دو دورهی زمانی به موازات هم پیش میروند، که در نوع خود تکنیک جالبی برای روایت داستان ست. یک بخش از داستان وقایع دوران پادشاهی کالیداسا[1]ست، که صد سال پس از میلاد مسیح، در راناپورا[2] پایتخت تپروبانی[3] به پادشاهی رسید، و بخش دیگر داستان، در قرن بیستویکم میگذرد. کالیداسا، در کوهستان یاکاگالا[4]، دژ مستحکم خود را بنا نهاده، و قصد آن دارد تا خود را همپای خدایان سازد. به همین منظور از معماری ایرانی، درخواست میکند تا در «باغهای کامیابی» برایش فواره بسازد. محفظهای که آب به فوارهها میرساند، با تلاش صدها برده پر میشود، و فوارهها به هوا برخاسته سپس خاموش میشدند. نقطه مقابل دژ کالیداسا، کوهستان مقدس سریکاندا[5] قرار گرفته، که جایگاه راهبان و روحانی اعظم است. دو هزار سال بعد «ونوار مورگان[6]» قصد دارد، کوهستان مقدس را به مرکز منظومهی شمسی تبدیل کند. نخستین پله از پلکانی که انسانها را به فضا میرساند قراراست بر بلندای سریکاندا ساخته شود. سریکاندا نردبان سیارات خواهد شد. آخرین دورهی زمانی داستان، دوهزار سال پس از ساخته شدن «آسانسور فضایی» است. زمانی که زمین را زمستانی سخت دربر گرفته، هوشمندانی از آن سوی منظومه شمسی، به دیدار انسانها آمده، یکی از آنها به نخستین ایستگاه فضایی انسانها نگاه میکند، و میپرسد: «چرا این ایستگاه برج کالیداسا نام گرفته است، در حالی که دوهزار سال بعد از مرگ کالیداسا ساخته شده است؟». راستی چرا؟ایدهی «آسانسور فضایی»، از خود «کلارک» بوده، اما گویا پیش از ایشان نیز شخص دیگری به این موضوع فکر کرده بود، موضوع را به قلم خود «کلارک» از مؤخره کتاب نقل میکنم: «این مفهوم جالب، نخست در «مجله ساینس» و در تاریخ 11 فوریه 1966 مطرح شد. اما پس از مدتی آشکار شد، که «مهندسی روسی» در سال 1960 طی مقالهای چنین چیزی را پیشنهاد کرده بوده، در طول سالهای بگذشته، فعالیتهای «نظری- علمی» و محاسبات زیادی در این خصوص صورت گرفته است. به نظر من زمان تفکر عمیق و اقدام لازم فرارسیده. استفاده از برج مداری، برای دستیابی به فضا نیز به صورت مقالهای کاملاً علمی در سال 1976 توسط تعدادی از دانشمندان، مورد بررسی قرار گرفته، البته تعدادی از دوستانم به این نکته اشاره کردهاند، که چنین برجی، تحت تأثیر نیروهای جاذبه خورشیدی و ماه، دچار حرکات رفت و برگشتی در جهت «شمال- جنوب» خواهد شد. در این صورت شاید «تپروبانی» محل چندان خوبی نباشد، اما بازهم بهتر از بقیه مکانها خواهد بود. و سرانجام نکته عجیب این است که سالها پیش از آنکه به موضوع رمان بیندیشم، ناخودآگاه محل موردنظر در وجودم نقش بسته بوده است. خانهای که در یکی از سواحل «سریلانکا» خریدهام به نقطه «حداکثر ثبات مدار ثابت»، بسیار نزدیک بود. دوست دارم در دوران پیری و در خانه آرامم، رشد چنین برجی را در آسمان تماشا کنم». پایان نقل از مؤخره کتاب----1 - کالیداسا: kalidasa2 - راناپورا: Ranapura3 – تپروبانی: این کشور وجود خارجی ندارد. اما در حدود نود درصد «شبیه جزیره سیلان» یا «سریلانکا»ی امروزی است. اسم «تپروبانی» در زبان شعر و نظم، مترادف دشت و صحرا است و تلفظ صحیح و کلاسیک باستانی آن «تپ-روب-آ-نی» میباشد. «میلتون» در کتاب چهارم از «بهشت گمشده» میگوید: «از هندوستان و شبه جزیره زرین و دورترین جزیره هند، تپروبانی...» معادل آن در زبان فارسی «سراندیب» است. شرح از مقدمه کتاب نقل شده است4 - یاکاگالا: yakagala، گالا(ترکی) همان کلات یا قلعه(عربی) است5 - سریکاندا: Serkanda6 - ونوار مورگان: Vennevar Morgan
What do You think about The Fountains Of Paradise (2001)?
Nutshell: earthlings begin building skyhook, aliens show up, aliens go away, earthlings finish skyhook, yay!Nifty parallel drawn between ancient monument builders and scifi megastructures through the use of an ancient Sri Lankan legend (or what purports to be, anyway). Lotsa technical detail. Whatever. Best parts of the book are the political interactions between interest groups regarding obstacles to building the space elevator. The main one, set up as structural to the narrative early on--religious opposition from monks on the only practical site--is removed by clever but literal deus ex machina (164). Most engaging sections involve the alien probe, which effectively ridicules earthling stupidity, especially religion (92-95). I'm just not sure why the aliens are in the book, though. Ending of the novel more or less ruined by a thriller-rescue sequence. Definitely a source text for Red Mars. Cool that the novel quotes a line from Goethe that would be eponymous for Asimov. Recommended for those paying substantial premiums insuring against every possible future, persons somewhat tired of establishing precedents in interplanetary law, and top-hatted Victorian personages.
—sologdin
Se ve que siempre ha habido un debate Clarke Vs Asimov, ya en vida los dos llevaban ese debate amistosamente y ahora cada uno de nosotros lo lleva conforme los va leyendo. En mi caso he leído más Asimov que Clarke pero cada vez que leo a Clarke me queda más claro que la balanza se pone de su lado. Tras leer "El fin de la infancia", "Cita con Rama" y ahora este libro, al terminarlos se te queda la sensación de que has leído CIENCIA FICCIÓN. Con Asimov en cambio son mas veces las que el gusto final me sabe a novela policíaca con decorado de ciencia ficción."Fuentes del paraíso" se centra en el ascensor espacial. Partiendo desde la concepción narra como se va montando y los problemas que encuentran. En la literatura lo único que había leído sobre el ascensor espacial era lo referido en la trilogía de Marte de Stanley. Stanley al ser más extenso desarrolla más el tema y tiene momentos más épicos (Uno de ellos inolvidable y que supone el final de Marte Rojo), pero eso no desmerece el libro de Clarke que desarrolla el ascensor de forma diferente a Stanley y sobre todo lo desarrolla 12 años antes que Stanley y en la tierra.Libro muy recomendable que si no le pongo las 5 estrellas es porque me ha parecido muy corto!
—Daniorte
When I was a kid, Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Fountains of Paradise' was one of my favorite books. I must've read it more than half a dozen times, checking it out from the library. The book has to do with the creation of a space elevator, and though I haven't read it, now, in over 30 years, I remember it dealing beautifully and sensitively with the conflicts between traditionalism and social and technological progress. It follows one scientist's 'impossible dream' to fulfillment, and although the ending is bittersweet, it is full of optimism: of the belief that innovation will truly make our world and our lives better, and that one brilliant person can, at the end, make a difference.
—Althea Ann
