Download Your Copy The Fountains Of Paradise By Arthur C. Clarke Supplied As Digital Copy

was a boring book, Solid, as far as the story and writing goes, yes, which is why theand not, Although if were really honest, its more like a,stars. Boring nonetheless.

Phew. With that off my chest, I can now attempt to coherently talk about the rest of it, Hindsight is/, and now I feel that this is probably not the best book to start discovering Arthur C, Clarke. Yes, I am saying I have not read anything by him before, Space Odyssey or RAMA books might have been a better start, Alas, here I am.

Character:

Vanavar Morgan, Architect of great renown, the builder of Gibraltar bridge is making a Space Elevator, All the other characters were more of a support cast, so the rating mainly reflects how I felt about Van, And, if I am honest, he was all right, He was a person, like any one of us who has a specific skill set to accomplish something no one before him thought of, He plays some political games, some relationship building games and a lot of experimentation as he proceeds with his obsession of the space elevator, Hes a good person, I felt, despite his desire to relocate monks from their thousands of years old home, Hes seeking to make a name for himself, sure but his idea will benefit humanity for decades to come, if not longer, He desires to be recognized as a celebrity, so up you might say hes a bit vain, but in the end the value of his project targets all of us on the planet, so can we really blame someone for wanting to get some credit, where credit is due Besides that, Vanavar is not interesting, hes better described as mechanical and methodical.
I got the sense that Clarke cared more about the elevator then some character development,


Plot:

I did like historical flashbacks and the tie in of an ancient civilization as the plot unfolded, That was cool, although I felt a bit indifferent about the locale, if Im being honest, I knew nothing about the area, so it felt very foreign and detached to me with names that were hard to pronounce, Now, if the story was more compelling and drama driven, I would have probably went online and researched the history to be able to immerse more, but it wasnt so I didnt feel compelled to do any research and just chugged along with the words.

I really loved the space probe looking for other civilizations that was smart enough to learn and communicate with us on friendly terms, This meant there were other civilizations out there and we, as species, could expect visitors, When, who knows. But the thought of it must have been comforting to the people in the novel, We are NOT alone. Now, some reviewers did not like the very atheistic tastes of the probe, but I found I didnt mind it, In fact what else would the probe see when it tried to learn things about us Existence of a God is a sort of a planetary obsession and has been for ever.
It was nice to have someone just to come and give the answer, Now the debate could be over and humanity can move on to the next obsession, Space travel and space elevator,
What mind boggled me, however is that we colonized Mars, but didnt go past that Its just casually thrown in there as a fact and thats it, shouldve been more content there,
The ending no spoilers was just a big let down to me, It should have been an emotionally charged ride, but it just wasnt,


Setting:

I liked the glimpse at the near future, Things are familiar yet different, Some passages date the novel, but understandably so, no harm, no foul there, I guess, the whole thing was just so focused on the actual elevator, materials needed to build it, political and legal affairs around getting approval etc that I did not feel the connection to the actual people that I wanted to feel.
It was just an overall dry prose, that had me slogging through pages with little to no emotion, I wish Clarke focused a little more on his characters, I get the hard scifi concept of the book, and that could still remain but it would have benefitted from being a bit longer with some more character development to make me care more about Van as a human, not just as a brilliant architect.


Overall, I would suggest you skip this one, Lets say I just took one for the team,


Roman “Ragnar” Inspiraciju za ovaj roman Clarke je dobrim dijelom dobio kad je preselio na Sri lanku, koja je očiti model za njegiovo kraljevstvo Taprobane, samo ju je pomaknuo malo prema ekvatoru.
Dobri stari SF The everreliable Clarke dishes up another humble scifi classic with this tale of a guy who decides to build a giant space elevator from Earth into high geosynchronous orbit,
Sounds crazy, right So thinks everyone in the novel, but the actual science is sound and so Vannevar Morgan, the wacko architect/engineer struggles against doubters, recalcitrant monks on the mountaintop he wants to use for the Earth base of the tower on a thinlydisguised Ceylon, journalists, and politicians to make his dream a reality.
All this happens against the backdrop of an alien probe that dashed through the solar system and basically upended all human belief and philosophy, so there's that, too,
Clarke's prose is effortless and this one is imbued with a little more humanity than a lot of his works do, which often come across a little sterile, In thend century visionary scientist Vannevar Morgan conceives the most grandiose engineering project of all time, and one which will revolutionize the future of humankind in space: a Space Elevator,,kilometers high, anchored to an equatorial island in the Indian Ocean.




"An amazing listgenuinely the best novels from sixty years of SF, " Iain M. Banks



"Delightfully written and at times almost unbearably exciting, " Kingsley Amis



"His enthusiasm is combined with his considerable literary and mythmaking skillsthe result is something special, " Sunday Telegraph



"A superbly crafted novel that may be his best, " Tribune Чудесна научна фантастика! Фонтаните на рая“ е много увлекателно написан роман, а и има страхотен главен герой блестящият инженер Ван Морган. Действието се развива в близкото бъдеще, в което човечеството е малко понапреднало, а и Марс вече е колонизирана

Морган е осъществил проект за междуконтинентален Гибралтарски мост“, свързващ Европа и Африка, но вече замисля следващата си гениална идея, за която е готов да даде всичко от себе си. А тя е за създаването на Космически асансьор, който да може да извежда хора и товари в орбита а някой ден може би да бъде и в основата на създаването на мост към Звездите“. Според инженера, идеалното място, на което да стартира своя свръхамбициозен проект, е страната Тейпробейн. Там, преди хилядолетия, древен владетел е изградил своите Фонтани на Рая“, а пък към настоящия момент се намира манастир на религиозна общност За това ключово за сюжета място Артър Кларк се е вдъхновил от любимата си Шри Ланка, в която е живял дълги години. В книгата срещаме още интересни образи, като бившия посланик Раджасингхе, смелата репортерка Максин Дювал и други. Както винаги, Кларк впечатлява читателите с мащабното си мислене и визия за бъдещето A truly breathtaking work of speculative fiction the scenes setkm above the Earth's surface actually triggered my vertigo at one point! Clarke's imagination is nothing less than visionary, all the moreso as it is based in real hard science.
Astonishing and highly recommended to fans of hard SF the climax might even appeal to the Space Opera crowd,.stars

Such a boring book by Arthur C, Clarke. It reminded me of his other book sitelinkA Fall of Moondust, which had likewise nothing much, yet was better than this one for me, This book had a decent start, but somehow failed to keep me in grasp, and it just kept dragging, and me waiting for it to somehow end, My actual rating isstar, But the extra star comes from rounding up from the extra points I had to provide for the location in the story, and for its slight historical background, Me sigue pasando lo mismo con cada libro de Clarke: grandes ideas pero ejecuciones no tan buenas,

En esta ocasión el gancho es bastante atractivo: el protagonista, responsable de la construcción del puente entre Europa y África a través de Gibraltar, imaginaros el chollo que tienen los monos con tanto turista, considera que es posible crear una Torre que una la Tierra con una órbita estacionaria para ahorrarnos tanto combustible en cohetes dadle unos años a Elon Musk para que lo haga.


Hasta ahí la historia parece atractiva, pero resulta que la torre tiene que ser construida en un punto exacto que es una montaña sagrada del sudeste asiático ocupada por unos monjes que se niegan a abandonar.
Y el bueno de Clarke se entretiene undel libro en contarnos las historias y leyendas alrededor de esa montaña y los monjes y los tira y aflojas para poder construir la torre.


Al final le mete algo de acción y los personajes interactúan con la torre y consigue que te interese un poco lo que ocurre, Pero me sigo quedando con la sensación de una gran idea desaprovechada, 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 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 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, sitelinkFor 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 firstpages have the structure of a goodpage 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 scifi 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 hamhanded 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 superscience 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 superalien 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 godlike 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 were far older and perhaps far wiser civilizations.
"

And if Clarke's imaginary alien probe doesn't convince you that superwise 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, .