Blurb:

An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth’s solar system on a collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system name Rama. What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization far more advanced than ours. They find an interior stretching over fifty kilometers; a forbidding cylindrical sea; mysterious and inaccessible buildings; and strange machine-animal hybrids, or “biots,” that inhabit the ship. But what they don’t find is an alien presence. So who―and where―are the Ramans?

Often listed as one of Clarke’s finest novels, Rendezvous with Rama won numerous awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Jupiter, and the British Science Fiction Awards. A fast-paced and compelling story of an enigmatic encounter with alien technology, Rendezvous with Rama offers both answers and unsolved mysteries that will continue to fascinate readers for generations.

Review:

Despite having to-date only read two novels by Arthur C. Clarke, this one—Rendezvous with Rama—and Childhood’s End (which I’ve also reviewed for SFFI), I think I can say with some confidence that Arthur C. Clarke is now one of my all-time favorite science-fiction authors. I know this could come across as a kind of poser-ish stance amidst the sci-fi world, like saying my favorite Rush album is Moving Pictures or my favorite Star Wars is The Empire Strikes Back (i.e. works of such universal acclaim that to say they are your “favorite” may betray that you actually have only a surface level appreciation of that creator’s works or franchise’s canon). But classics don’t become classics by accident. Clarke clearly knew how to write, and he wrote some all-timers; like Rendezvous with Rama.

I mentioned in my review of Childhood’s End that Rendezvous with Rama had been on my TBR ever since learning that Dune(s) Part 1 and 2 director Denis Villeneuve was planning to adapt a big screen adaptation of it; and as a huge fan of Velleneuve’s films (not merely the Dunes—I think Arrival is one of the greatest films of all time) I was keenly interested in exploring Rama for myself prior to seeing the film (whenever it might land in cinemas). And so, after picking up a used copy of it from Powell’s Books in Hyde Park, I did just that. 

Having only Childhood’s End as my only other current point of reference for Clarke’s written works (but having also seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which Clarke co-wrote the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick; and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which—though written solely by writer/director Peter Hyams—is adapted from Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two), I was pleased to find that Rama was a much more straightforward narrative than Childhood’s End. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Childhood’s End, but it was definitely of a nature that defied any immediate “getting” of it. Rendezvous with Rama, conversely, feels much more like a documentary in book form. The story is very matter-of-fact, dancing between protagonists as they explore the enigmatic Rama and document their discoveries.

On that note then, if you breezed past the blurb above, Rendezvous with Rama accounts the discovery, interception, and exploration of a vast, alien spaceship that mysteriously appears in our solar system some hundred or so years from now. Bill Norton is Commander of the spaceship sent to intercept Rama—the thematically resonantly named Endeavour. The rest of the book then, is the account of the Endeavour’s crew’s explorations of the interior of Rama, in hopes that they can discover anything about its purpose or origin before it gravity-slingshots around the Sun and out of our solar system forever. It is a kind of first-contact story, presented as an exploration narrative. And the name of Norton’s ship clearly gives that away. Endeavour was the name of the ship captained by James Cook, the famed Pacific explorer. Other ships name dropped by Norton cement the exploratory impulse of Rendezvous with Rama, as Norton makes mention of the Calypso (captained by Jacques-Yves Couteau), the Beagle (of Darwin’s voyages to the Galapagos islands), and the Challenger (of the Challenger Expedition, one of the foundational expeditions of the field of study we now call “Oceanography”). If you, like me, recognized any or all of those ship names without their explanations, then Rendezvous with Rama is definitely something you will love. 

While there are a lot of great space exploration stories out there, even speculative ones that take place on imaginative alien worlds (my favorite of The Expanse novels is #4, Cibola Burn, because it is exactly that kind of story), Rendezvous with Rama is so specific in its setting and its methods of exploration, so methodical and deliberate, that it has a feeling of tangibility that could almost trick you into believing it was non-fiction; and the documentary-ish presentation of the text only reinforces that feeling. 

And so the Endeavour arrives at Rama, and thus begins the exploration of the alien ship. And though I said above that the exploration is quite matter-of-fact, it is not without excitement. I’ve mentioned in these reviews that one of my favorite, self-taxonomized sub-genres of sci-fi is “fixing the problem in space” fiction—stuff like Andy Weir’s The Martian, Ben Bova’s Venus, or Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders—and Rama, though rarely asked to fix life-or-death problems like in the aforementioned stories, still fits well into this sub-genre, as it recounts a constant journey of solutions and reversals as the crew of the Endeavour probe deeper into Rama and deeper into a world that defies their understanding. 

I think it’s remarkable that something like this could be written a mere 4 years after human beings first landed on the Moon. Its texture is so—like I said above—specific, that it really does become engrossingly believable as you move through its pages; but also it is the kind of thing you’d think would have to have been written decades after humans first breached the Kármán line, if for no other reason that to give time to allow our collective understanding of the realities of space travel to solidify in the public consciousness. But not Clarke. He knew what was up. 

If you have any appreciation for space-exploration fiction, definitely add Rendezvous with Rama to your list.