Fountains of Paradise

In the fictional nation of Taprobane, a country near Sri Lanka on the equator, an engineer arrives wishing to build a space elevator with a new impossibly-strong filament.

Motifs

• Deadly High Specific Tensile Strength Materials

  An engineer creates such a wire called Hyperfilament which he intends to use to build a space elevator. That engineer later loses a thumb to the fiber during the first deployment attempt of the tether.

• Space Elevator

  Fountains of Paradise introduced the concept of the space elevator to a wide audience for the first time. The central plot of the book revolves around the planning and construction of the first space elevator.