The Fountains of Paradise

Vannevar Morgan built the longest bridge on Earth and now wants to build something considerably harder: a tower from the equator to geostationary orbit, twenty two thousand miles of hyperfilament, so that reaching space becomes a matter of taking a lift rather than burning fuel.

There is exactly one site on the planet with the right geology and the right position, and it is the summit of Sri Kanda on the island of Taprobane, which has held a Buddhist monastery for two thousand years. The monks will not move, and their claim is legally unassailable, and Morgan spends much of the novel trying to find a way around a religious order with better lawyers and more patience than he has.

Around this Clarke braids a second story, set two thousand years earlier, about the tyrant Kalidasa who built a pleasure garden and fortress on a rock nearby and whose reach also exceeded what the world would allow.

The engineering is the pleasure. Clarke works through the materials science, the orbital mechanics, the money and the politics, and then produces a genuinely tense rescue sequence on the unfinished tower.

There is also a first contact episode dropped in almost as an aside, in which an alien probe passes through the solar system, answers humanity's questions politely, tells everyone that the religions of the galaxy are a known developmental phase, and leaves.

The engineering remains the real pleasure. Clarke works through the materials science, the taper of the cable, the money, the politics and the weather, and then produces a genuinely tense rescue on the unfinished tower with a storm coming.

Around three hundred pages, cool and elegant, with characters who exist mainly to carry the argument, which is the standing complaint about Clarke and is true here.

Best for readers who want an engineering problem taken seriously from first principles to ribbon cutting, and a writer who believed the future would be built by competent people solving hard problems.