The Fountain of the Earth

Save the world

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Newman is not Tolstoy or Kafka, obviously - he used to be the comedy partner of David Baddiel. But even so, he's pretty good at conducting vast ensembles of relationships and following the displacements of people due to political violence and economic inequality. He's also good at describing random encounters with strangers. He's good on layers of attachment and the fragility of human relationships.

He handles his complex plot with considerable skill. There are incredible coincidences worthy of the best of 19th-century fiction, and lashings of very tasty detail - lots of beef and juice on VNRs video news releases , on "astroturf" fake grassroots movements , and on bomb-making be careful. Even some of the dialogue is quite good. If you get a chance, go to a bookshop and read through pages If you like this, you'll like the book. But to warn you regarding the defects of this massive and noble endeavour: A tone that resounds with moral superiority and force.

A tone that rings out clear and high above mere subjectivity and the dull daily concerns of the bourgeoisie. In Newman's case this means that there's quite a lot of this: But whatever the arrangement of letters it was the same old toxins in the mulligatawny. Symbols can also prove pretty dangerous and cumbersome in the hands of the radical and the revolutionary, and the symbolic fountain of Newman's title is no exception. Maybe it was the fountain at the centre of the world, responding minutely to everything that's going on everywhere on earth. But maybe it was just a fountain. As for the unauthorized hurricane, "there was the ironic role of the Venerable Parakarma, who must surely now feel that he was the pawn of some malicious gods.

Monsoon Control promises such a thing will never happen again. Seven years later, construction of the Tower, as it is now called, is well underway.

The formerly sacred mountain of Sri Kanda is now busy with construction activity and is being tunneled. Instead of four tubes, as originally envisioned, the Tower will have a square cross-section and the vehicles will ride up and down on the outside. At the moment, only the scaffolding is in place; this consists of a single 5-centimeter-wide "tape" that has been nicknamed "The Billion-Ton Diamond" because it is made entirely of carbon. An asteroid has been towed into Earth orbit to hold the tape taut by centrifugal force.

Pieces of orbiting junk from the first hundred years of space exploration have to be eliminated.

Once finished, the Tower will be transported whole to Mars. Morgan's assistant engineer Warren Kingsley gives Morgan a tour of the mock-up of the car that will carry passengers up and down the Tower. Maxine Duval, the TV journalist, takes a test ride up the tape in a "spider", which looks like "a motorized bo'sun's chair". She ascends twelve kilometers and so is equipped with an oxygen mask.

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She is astonished by the view. Part 5 — Ascension An astrophysicist and a group of his students are stranded, along with their pilot, in an emergency chamber called the Basement six hundred kilometres up after an accident with their transport capsule.

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They have no food and limited oxygen. Whilst a laser on a weather-control satellite is able to supply heat, it is imperative to provide them with filter masks against the increasing carbon dioxide and also with food, air, and medical supplies, until some rescue can be effected. Despite his rapidly failing health, Morgan asserts his right to take the vital supplies up the Tower personally.

The extra battery that was attached to give the spider the power needed to reach the Basement fails to detach at the necessary moment. Morgan uses the single strand of hyperfilament he always carries with him to saw through the bolt. While succeeding in dropping the heavy battery, he has exhausted his already frail heart.

File:Spaceship Earth and the Fountain of Nations at night 2.jpg

After reaching the chamber and delivering the supplies, Morgan walks around the catwalk surrounding the Tower to investigate the damage caused by the explosion. On the way back down, he realizes that the geostationary satellites could be connected, and more space elevators could be constructed, forming a wheel-like structure without gravitational-perturbation problems. Before reaching the bottom, he dies of heart failure.

Epilogue A short epilogue titled "Kalidasa's Triumph" envisages Earth about fifteen hundred years later.

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The sun has cooled and Earth, slowly being covered by permafrost, is devoid of life except for the bottom of the ocean; humans now live on the terraformed inner planets as well as on Mars. Several space elevators lead to a giant "circumterran" space station that encircles the planet at geostationary altitude. The analogy with a wheel is evident: An inhabitant of the planet that launched Starglider has arrived and is studying humanity.

This being is unable to understand such human thoughts as myth and humor. The visitor asks why the first space elevator is called the Tower of Kalidasa: The main theme of the novel is preceded by, and to some extent juxtaposed with, the story of the life and death of King Kashyapa I of Sri Lanka fictionalised as King Kalidasa. It foreshadows the exploits of Vannevar Morgan in his determination to realise the space elevator. Other subplots include human colonization of the Solar system and the first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Clarke envisions a microscopically thin in his demonstrator sample but strong "hyperfilament" that makes the elevator possible.

The Fountain of the Earth

Although the hyperfilament is constructed from "continuous pseudo-one-dimensional diamond crystal", Clarke later expressed his belief that another type of carbon, Buckminsterfullerene , would play the role of hyperfilament in a real space elevator. The latest developments in carbon nanotube technology bring the orbital elevator closer to possible realisation. The story is set in the fictional equatorial island country of Taprobane, which Clarke has described as "about ninety percent congruent with the island of Ceylon now Sri Lanka ", south of its real-world location.

The ruins of the palace at Yakkagala as described in the book very closely match the real-life ruins at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka.

The mountain on which the space elevator is built is called Sri Kanda in the book, and bears a strong resemblance to the real mountain Sri Pada. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It had put an end to the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries. Design of Space Elevator: The Tower, for all its overwhelming size, was merely the support for something much more complex.

Along each of its four sides must run thirty-six-thousand kilometers of track, capable of operation at speeds never before attempted. This had to be powered for its entire length by superconducting cables, linked to massive fusion generators, the whole system being controlled by an incredibly elaborate, fail-safe computer network. A Space Odyssey A Space Odyssey film A Space Odyssey comics Clarke's Mysterious World Arthur C.

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