The Fountains of Paradise was published by Gollancz in 1979 and won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Vannevar Morgan, an engineer of monumental ambition, attempts to build a space elevator — a cable stretching from the surface of the Earth to geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometers — on the tropical island of Taprobane (modeled on Clarke’s adopted home of Sri Lanka). The engineering challenges are immense, and they are complicated by the presence of a Buddhist monastery on the mountaintop where the elevator’s base must be anchored.
Clarke intercut the modern engineering narrative with a parallel story set two thousand years earlier: King Donatello, who built an impossible palace and garden (the “fountains of paradise”) on the same mountain. The parallel suggested that the impulse to build beyond human scale — to create monuments that defy gravity and mortality — is a permanent feature of human civilization.
The space elevator concept, which Clarke did not invent but did more than anyone to popularize, has since become a serious engineering proposal, with materials scientists working on carbon nanotube cables that might make it feasible.
Collecting The Fountains of Paradise
First edition (Gollancz, London, 1979): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine in jacket: $100–$300
- US first edition (Harcourt): $50–$150