Rendezvous with Rama: Rama Series, Book 1

I first came across this book via BBC Radio Four's programme 'Story Time' in November 1976 (or, as my wife says A Long Time Ago). It impressed the hell out of the ten year old me and, having ordered it from the local library, was impressed all over again. My dad was already a big sci-fi fan and, as a result of my evident enjoyment, began to feed me his Asimov and Clarke collection volume by volume.Rama remains as fresh and enjoyable a book at nearly fifty-one as it was forty years ago. What I appreciate most now is the spare, uncluttered style of the author. Clarke is not big on wordy prose and his emphasis on concepts and story is often at the expense of detailed characterisation. In some ways this makes the book dated. If you are expecting detailed interpersonal subplots then you are likely to be disappointed.Rama is on a hyperbolic path through the solar system, so Commander Norton and the crew of the Endeavour have a limited amount of time to explore the vast interior of the craft. What I liked about this was that there are no sudden shock revelations as to what Rama 'really' is. The explorers struggle to make sense of an inexplicable alien environment and what they do discover comes via good old fashioned scientific investigation and reasoned deduction.This is classic 'hard' science fiction, emotionally understated by todays standards perhaps, but no less powerful for that.

What’s there to say: proper, good, classic sci-fi. As with Childhood’s End, it is well deserving of it’s place in the “SF Masterworks” series.This time, instead of actual aliens coming to Earth and a prophecy of how humanity will eventually evolve, in Rendezvous With Rama we have a large alien vessel entering the solar system on a path that will take it inside the orbit of Mercury, around the Sun, and then, is anyone’s guess. Will it adjust it’s trajectory, pull a breaking manouvre and find a stable orbit in the solar system, or will it use the Sun and sling shot elsewhere? Where did it come from, who sent it, who or what is inside, what is it’s purpose?Set in a time when humans have colonised several planets and moons in the solar system and space flight is quite normal, we have one space ship — the Endeavour, captained by a big fan of James Cook — that is able to get some fuel and rendezvous with this vessel and investigate it. However, once the vessel has passed inside the orbit of Mercury, the Mercurians decide to take matters into their own hands and ignore what the rest of humanity has to say on the matter.As i say, this is a proper old school sci-fi first contact story at its best and well deserving of its place as a “SF Masterworks”.

Rendezvous With Rama describes the exploration of a vast alien space ship. This vessel takes the form of a spinning cylinder, fifty kilometres long by twenty kilometres wide. Centrifugal forces anchor a miniature world of cities, fields and seas against its inner surface. With Rama apparently abandoned, this is a detective story where the explorers look for clues to its origins and intentions.
Let’s start with the good stuff.
For me, the best thing about this book was the idea of Rama. I found all kinds of thought provoking contradictions in its circular topography. Rama can actually cause you to ponder on space and time, specifically whether they are rather more circular than linear. We live on a world with a surface that bends away from us over the horizon, which makes us prone to thinking in terms of straight lines. But by turning things inside out, by taking away the horizon and letting the landscape sweep around overhead, we get a more intuitive model of how things might really be.
So that was the positive. Now we come to the negative. I have seen Arthur C. Clarke’s prose described as “workmanlike” or “functional”. To describe my view of his writing, I suggest you imagine a technically minded 1970s school boy, with odd views on women, marriage, and - bizarrely - farming. After an A in a physics exam goes to his head, he decides to write an adventure story in which he and his thinly disguised friends explore an alien space ship. But, damn it, for the most part I still enjoyed the story because of that great revolving idea of Rama.Books like this show that people are often more interested in ideas than good writing. There's even a name for a type of book which is built around a single idea, which can be expressed in a few words, or even in one word - it's called high concept. Lots of Hollywood blockbusters are high concept: Planet Of The Apes, Snakes On A Plane, Jaws, Speed. The power of an idea is sobering as you sweat over editing your adverbs. If you haven’t got an idea that appeals to people, then polished prose probably won’t help. But I suppose, on a more reassuring and philosophical note, if the universe is circular, then there’s a chance that even poor writing can go all the way round and meet up with an interesting story somewhere at the back. That’s what seems to have happened with Rendezvous With Rama

For its time a remarkable work, keenly thought out from beginning to end, and written in that all-ages-welcome style of Clarke's (I was 15 when I first read it). Like the "proper" sci-fi of it's age, it explores an idea from beginning to end with a range of options, putting the characters second (they're all very nice Clarke-type characters). This lets the writer concentrate on showing you his idea, and not padding out the novel with a whole lot of superfluous bumph and dialogue, as you get today. From an age when novel writing was a discipline, not undisciplined. Has a very high re-read factor; I'm up to about my 20th read, hence I've acquired it now on kindle, the paperback fell to pieces. Sadly the sequels go very much off-beam, I gave up on those, this novel allows the reader to ask and answer a whole load of questions for himself (typical of Clarke), and the follow-ups didn't match my own mental creations.