The Fountains of Paradise

It's really great.

Next up, The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke.

This is another book- Oh ... from the 1970s.

I was like, oh, 1979, Arthur C. Clarke.

And- And gardens [laughs] ...

so even though in the novel it doesn't explicitly say, all right, w- the, the previous fantasy was all happening, like, you know, like medieval Europe, like fantasy Europe, and then here they've gone off to the East to get away from all of that and, you know, some people are coming, go- like, previous characters have come all the way over here, and now they're in this city.

And I was just, like, having just read The Fountains of Paradise, I was like, "Oh, so, like, we're in India or Sri Lanka," right? Mm-hmm.

You know, that was just in my head.

What's 36,000 kilometres long, made of a super strong material that doesn't exist yet, and replaces rocket launchers? It can only be a space elevator, a speculative mega-engineering project that's been a fixture of science fiction since 1979.

That was the year that SF superstar Arthur C. Clarke popularised the concept with his novel The Fountains of Paradise.

Few mega-engineering concepts have inspired science fiction writers like the space elevator.

It's long since become a beloved SF device, often as a secondary detail.

What's commonplace in the genre today, though, was once very new, and so it was with The Space Elevator in 1979.

That was the year that two major novels by British-born expatriate authors popularised the concept.

One was The Web Between the Worlds by Charles Sheffield, and the other was The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke.

The two novels have striking similarities, but Clarke wrote at the time that the publication of the two books reflected not a clear case of plagiarism, but merely an idea whose time has come.