After reading the article on Slashdot about the plans to build a Space Elevator, I decided to revisit my childhood and re-read Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise.  This time in English though, not in Dutch.  Fountains Of Paradise is one of those rare books that captivates the reader from the very first sentence until the last, one of those books that does everything right.  The transition from ancient (100 AD) to present-day Taprobane in the first chapter is a piece of genius, the literary equivalent of the monkey throwing up a bone that becomes a spacecraft.