I hated Childhood's End, I don't like Clarke's politics and his persona on "Arthur Clarke's Mysterious World" annoyed me, so I keep finding myself surprised when I enjoy one of Clarke's books, even though I should know better by now.

The Fountains of Paradise won the 1980 Hugo and was a very good book. The characters seemed well defined, better than in most of Clarke's works.

I'm giving this 3 stars on a 0-4 scale. It almost made 4 stars but the book's pacing seemed a bit uneven and the last part wasn't what I wanted to read (Which isn't fair in one respect. The last part of the book was extremely well done, it just turned the focus away from what I'd wanted to read).

The Plot:

Vandevar Morgan, who built a bridge spanning the Straits of Gibralter has a new dream: he'll build an elevator to an orbiting space platform. Unfortunately, the only place it can be built is on a sacred mountain in Sri Kanda (read: Sri Lanka). The monks there don't want to leave, however there's a legend that when some butterflies make it up the mountain to the monastery, the monks will have to leave. Morgan gets the ok to do a test of the building material and has a thread of it lowered from orbit. Suddenly, via a fortuitous deus ex machina, the weather control goes nuts and gale force winds snap the thread. But they also blow butterflies up the mountain. The monks leave.

There's an interlude as told by a narrator who I found to be sneeringly condescending (for what it's worth, the narrator is constantly wrong about the story). The narrator tells us how a space probe from an alien system came zipping by and in passing told us that only mammals have come up with religion and there's really no such thing anyhow. Per the narrator "[the space probe] had put an end to the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries."

What's funny is how stupidly wrong the narrator is (in the context of the story), since the immediately previous scene dealt with Buddhist monks who don't seem to have given up their "pious gibberish".

The second section deals with the preparation for the construction of the elevator and some of the political maneuvering.

The final section has a group people riding up on a prototype elevator and, due to sunspot activity, gets stuck. Morgan rides up to save them. He succeeds, but has a heart attack and dies. A tiny epilogue shows that the space elevator was the first of many and we colonize the solar system.

• I find it sadly amusing that Clarke's narrator (and possibly by extension, Clarke) has such contempt for all religion, except the one he likes, which is somehow magically different. (I'm aware that there's an argument that Buddhism isn't a religion, but rather a philosophy: I don't buy it. Anything that allows for a soul, a method of "salvation" (The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path) and an afterlife (Nirvana) is close enough to a religion for me)
• Assuming that the book itself didn't disprove the narrator's thesis (that the "oh, by the way, there's no such thing as God" comment from the alien probe destroyed all religion), I strongly doubt that an alien telling people that God doesn't exist would change anyone's opinion. So it's an atheist alien probe? Big deal. (In all fairness, the alien comments that of the hundreds of races it's aware of, only races that had two-parent reproduction and the kids stay with the parents for years 'invented' religion. However: I still say that religious folks wouldn't buy this argument. The athiest-theist arguments would be exacerbated by it, not ended)
• One of Clarke's characters thinks that: e^(pi x i)+1=0 is so profound and beautiful that it implies a superior intelligence. Why? What does it mean? I looked up Euler (the guy who discovered the equation) and found that he was a topologist, but couldn't find a reference for that specific equation. Some explanation would have been nice.
• The first section, where Morgan is trying to get the land from the monks is by far the best. It's interspersed with legends and myths. The whole section seems far richer than the rest of the book. It may be Clarke's best work.
• I'd have appreciated a pronunciation guide for the 10 letter Indian names.
• Morgan gets a patch that monitors his heart rate and loudly announces "Mr. Morgan, your heartbeat is too high. Please sit down". If these existed as written, I'd propose a law allowing people in resturants, theaters, movies, etc to shoot the person wearing the patch. Clarke should have designed it with an earphone, leaving the loudspeaker for real emergencies.
• Clarke tosses in weather control about a 1/3 of the way in the book. Weather control seems far to advanced for such an otherwise plausible near future. (How would weather control work anyway? How are those air masses being shoved around? What about Chaos Theory?)
• I also didn't like the fact that he made up an island that just happened to have the right features and be in the right place. I'd have been more impressed if he stuck with the real world and tried to figure out how to overcome the real problems faced. Granted, if he had, he wouldn't have been able to tell the story he wanted to.
• The parts of the book I wanted to see (the political struggle to get the tower built, and the physical problems of building the tower) were over far too quickly. The third section almost seemed like someone told Clarke, "You need to do more action: give us the Towering Inferno in space"
• Vandevar Morgan was a great character. If Clarke does a prequel to Fountains of Paradise featuring Morgan building the Bridge (and if he does it withOUT a collaborator), I'd buy it in hardcover.

Next up: The Snow Queen by Vinge. I've been looking forward to this one, but I'm taking a several book break before I start on it. I'm in the mood for a reread of Snowcrash by Stephenson, and maybe Quarantine by Egan. Based on the first chapter of The Snow Queen, I'm clearly not in the right frame of mind to appreciate The Snow Queen. : )