I saw a bunch of people throwing out good sci-fi space elevator examples and had to drop a reference to the space elevator in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. The descriptions are epic and do a good job of giving a real sense of placiness to the result of truly enormous engineering.
Then let me drop a reference to Sundiver by David Brin, which is the start of the uplift cycle.
The elevator is by far the least interesting idea of these novels which center about a future where we have uplifted (given sapience) monkeys and dolphins. We are also trying to survive in an unkind universe where Earth is a third world political power that is making religious fanatics angry.
