I saw some news about a possible movie adaptation of “Rendezvous with Rama” and it set me thinking again about the book and what I thought about it. There’s quite a lot here, so I thought it would be worth sharing in a blog post. Let’s start with some history.
Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke (born 1917) was the pre-eminent British science fiction writer in the mid part of the 20th century with a prodigious output of novels and short stories. Globally, he was considered one of the “big three” of science fiction and he sold well in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Famously, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was based on his 1948 short story (The Sentinel) and Clarke wrote the movie screenplay with Kubrick. The movie's psychotic HAL 9000 computer was an example of his fascination with new field of AI, though he would have been aware of the real-world “AI Winter” that came in the early 1970s.
I think it’s fair to say that much of Clarke’s fiction was driven by story rather than serious character development; many, but not all, of his characters seem a little one-dimensional and the dialog is sometimes flat. Unfortunately, some of the misogynistic and class-based attitudes of the time leak into some of his writing. In some respects, this is surprising because Clarke himself was gay, but perhaps none of us can fully escape the attitudes of our times.
Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956, where he lived until his death in 2008.
The story of Rendezvous with Rama
In the year 2131, Spaceguard detects a large object entering the solar system which it later names “Rama”. A probe detects that it’s a 20 x 50km cylinder, obviously constructed by aliens. Because of its trajectory, the only crewed space vessel that can intercept it is the space freighter Endeavour. Endeavour’s crew aren’t explorers, they’re just a well-trained freighter crew who happen to be in the right place at the right time. The crew intercept Rama and board it.
(Rama as imagined by Nano Banana)
Inside Rama, they find several city-sized clusters of objects and a central cylindrical sea, but no life and no controlling AI. As Rama gets closer to the sun, it warms up and comes to life, meaning strange robotic life forms start appearing and doing things the crew don't understand. One of the crew explores deeper into the interior (in a very contrived way!) and has to be rescued, which brings some elements of danger into the novel (which up to this point has been a “space procedural”). The rescue is against the clock as the crew know their time on Rama is limited because of its flight path.
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