Rendezvous With Rama (1973)

I had a good time with this much-honored award winner by Arthur C. Clarke (Hugo, Nebula, etc.). It involves a cigar-shaped asteroid, dubbed Rama, which comes sailing into the inner solar system circa 2130. Humans have settled a handful or so of solar system planets and satellites under a “United Planets” (U.P.) governing structure. Rendezvous With Rama is a first contact novel, a very quiet, mysterious, and ultimately powerful one built on observing things that are hard to explain. The asteroid is hollow. A crew is dispatched to investigate. I don’t really have anything close to an engineer’s imagination, so a lot of the descriptions and explanations were lost on me a little, which was frustrating. Some diagrams might have helped. The asteroid / vessel, caked in a kilometer of rock, is 20 kilometers wide by 50 long, spinning on its long axis to create an artificial gravity that is strongest at the inner edges of the cylinder. There is an enormous sea in there and many, many wonders to be discovered. The science is basically straightforward and understandable and often creative. Various mysteries are never resolved, but in the end that amounts to more a strength of this novel. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s Clarke returned to Rama for three more novels so there’s still more to be discovered. I remain generally dubious about sequels so I’m in no hurry to get to them, not least because of the time lag, but maybe I will. For now I enjoyed the opportunity to dip a little more into Clarke, one of the titans of classic midcentury sci-fi. Somehow I always think of him as US (with Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Simak) but Clarke is British. His novels, the ones I know, are always evenhanded and paced well, with lots of interesting futuristic ideas and a strong sense of the science driving them. Much here, for better or worse, has vaguely the wooden tones of 1950s SF—literature and movies. I like it because I associate a certain wooden feeling with the nerds and geeks of SF, living in dreams of the future. As a first contact novel, Rendezvous With Rama somehow has the kind of veracity that makes it feel like it really happened. Some wonderful moments here.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.