The Fountains of Paradise

An engineer sets out to build a space elevator anchored to a mountain on Taprobane, Clarke’s lightly fictionalised Sri Lanka, and has to move a monastery that has occupied the summit for two thousand years to do it. It won the Hugo and the Nebula. Clarke was an early and serious advocate of the orbital-tether idea, and the book reads as the closest thing science fiction has to a megaproject novel: materials science, financing, politics and the religious claim on a site, all treated as parts of the same engineering problem.

Context: On the a16z Infra Reading List under Clarke, where the team notes he was an early proponent of space elevators — the clearest case of the list’s premise that science fiction is the most infrastructure-minded literary genre because it is about new systems and the people who give their lives to building them.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Arthur C. Clarke — the author.
• Engineering — the book’s real subject: one structure, and everything it takes to get it built.
• Rendezvous with Rama — the other late-Clarke title on the list.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.
• a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.