{"id":14145,"date":"2022-03-13T17:26:38","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T00:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=14145"},"modified":"2024-10-10T19:50:22","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T02:50:22","slug":"arthur-c-clarke-rendezvous-with-rama-1973","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2022\/03\/13\/arthur-c-clarke-rendezvous-with-rama-1973\/","title":{"rendered":"Arthur C. Clarke, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was Clarke\u2019s first novel after \u201creturning\u201d to writing novels following the break of nearly a decade collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on the book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/strong><\/em>. (His previous major novel had been A Fall of Moondust<\/strong> in 1961.) In the fact success of 2001 facilitated a major 3-book deal for a record sum of money; Rama<\/strong> was the first, and was followed by Imperial Earth<\/strong> in 1975 and The Fountains of Paradise<\/strong> in 1979. And these three were his last substantial novels, followed only by 2001<\/strong> sequels and three relatively short novels in the late \u201880s and early \u201990.<\/p>\n

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The book was significant for me in that it was one of the first hardcover SF novels I bought, back then in 1973, along with, the same year, Heinlein\u2019s Time Enough for Love<\/strong>. My Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition is the first US edition; the earlier actual first edition, from British published Gollancz, came out a couple months earlier. Also in the photo is the current trade paperback edition, from Gollancz in 2006.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s plot is simple: an alien spacecraft, at first thought to be an asteroid, enters the solar system from interstellar space, headed for a close pass around the sun. It\u2019s named Rama. An International Space Advisory Council sends a ship, the Endeavour, to intercept it. Rama is huge, cylindrical, alien, and uninhabited. The IAC ship\u2019s crewmen board and enter it, explore for a while, and then withdraw as they realize Rama isn\u2019t settling into any kind of local orbit, but is using the sun to escape the solar system and head back out into space.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s it.\u201d I recall one of the news magazines (Time<\/em> or Newsweek?)<\/em> of the day publishing a review, obviously written by someone unsympathetic to science fiction, that ends its precis with those words, as if the reviewer had found nothing in the book he felt necessary for a \u201cnovel.\u201d But then virtually all reviews and essays about science fiction in mainstream publications of that era were similarly dismissive.<\/p>\n

In fact, Rama<\/strong> was and remains a significant and popular novel. It\u2019s of a class of SF works about so-called \u201cbig dumb objects,\u201d enormous alien artifacts that are explored by humans, to some success or not. (The famous progenitor to Rama was Larry Niven\u2019s Ringworld<\/strong> in 1970.)<\/p>\n

So the interest here is in Clarke imagining how alien technology might work, what it might be for, and how human explorers might try to understand it. It\u2019s a book as much about all its incidental detail as about any broad crisis and resolution. (There is one crisis subplot, about a threat by the human colony on Mercury to destroy it.) And in fact, the purpose and functioning of Rama remain unknown as the book ends.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the novel is about the human astronauts entering the inside of Rama, a huge cylinder that spins so that \u201cartificial gravity\u201d exists on the inside. They enter through one of the \u201cpoles\u201d at the center axis, descent on long ladders and staircases, and explore what seem to be \u201ctowns\u201d and fields. There is a cylindrical \u201csea\u201d dividing one half of Rama from the other. At the far end are huge spikes jutting out parallel to the axis. They discover alien robots who try to clean up after them, but no intelligent life. One astronauts uses a light aerocycle to sail through the air down the axis to reach the other side, just as a huge storm erupts, an effect of the warming of Rama and its insides as it approaches the sun. And much more fascinating stuff.<\/p>\n

Some particular notes:<\/p>\n