The Fountains of Paradise

The Fountains of Paradise is a science fiction novel by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1979. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for best novel, and its subject is the construction of a space elevator.

Vannevar Morgan is the engineer who proposes the Orbital Tower: a structure anchored on the Earth's equator and reaching up to a satellite in geostationary orbit, which would lift people and supplies into space without the expense of rockets. Technical constraints leave only two possible sites on the planet, and the one he wants is occupied by a monastery whose inhabitants have their own reasons for staying there.

The story is framed by two others. One looks back thousands of years to a king named Kalidasa, who built a pleasure garden with working fountains as an engineering feat of his own age; the other takes place long after Morgan's lifetime and concerns aliens arriving at Earth. Between them Clarke sets out an argument between the people who measure progress in structures and the people who measure it in what those structures displace.