The Fountains Of Paradise

from electrascaife

An Elon Musk type wants to build a bridge from Earth to a space station and faces all sorts of challenges to make it happen. Hm. I liked the story fine, when I could find it, but there's too much time spent detailing the engineering behind the bridge, the mechanical problems it might face and how...

from andersocheva

A brilliant but slightly obsessed engineer wants to build a space elevator using a new carbon-tube filament. The main problem is that the only suitable spot on the whole globe is on top of a sacred mountain on the island of Taprobane, and the Buddhist monks in the temple on the mountain top are u...

from helver

Vannevar Morgan is a man with a plan. Several plans, actually. His first engineering masterwork was a bridge from Africa to Gibraltar - 3 kilometers high - that allowed land traffic between Africa and Europe. His second masterwork was the space elevator. His third masterwork, accomplished only de...

from James_Knupp

I was not actually looking forward to reading this book when I got it. I had just finished The Forever War by Joe Haldeman which I had so been looking forward to, but didn't end up enjoying very much. So when I went to pick out the next book to read, I didn't go with one I particularly was excite...

from klondike98

Clarke takes the idea of a space elevator and invents a material that solves the major hurdle to constructing such an elevator today - form of carbon that has enough tensile strength to support itself over the long distance from Earth to geosychronous orbit. Surrounding this major idea is the sto...