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Rendevous with Rama, Arthur C. Clark (1973)
Synopsis
Again, doing a synopsis is probably silly but I think it's cool. This one doesn't have much of a plot, but that's not really the point. It's the 2130s, so roughly 100 years in the future, and, to be honest, this universe is way ahead of us developmentally speaking. We learn that humans inhabit many of the obvious planets and moons in our solar system, most notably earth, the moon, mars and mercury. Several other moons in the solar system are also inhabited and represented by a united planets organization. Seemingly, one representative per planet. They do point out explicitly that most of the bodies are not planets, so the name is technically inaccurate, that's a fun detail. That wasn't revealed all at once, but piecemeal as the story goes on. The inciting incident is when a bizarre asteroid is noticed coming into our solar system, at first practical opportunity, one of earth's telescopes takes a look at it, but until the telescope looked, there was no reason to think it anything special. They had named it Rama but that was about it. They did, however, notice some odd behavior, it appeared not to have much variation, indicating that it was either incredibly round or not spinning at all. Both of those would be highly irregular for an asteroid. Due to the irregularity, some organization decides to reroute a ship, the Endeavor, captained by the most-protagonisty character, Captain Norton. Nortan makes a rendevous (shocker!) with the asteroid, and the event is highly publicized on all the occupied planets due to the live stream video of the affair. And to everyone's shock, the asteroid is a cylinder that is rapidly spinning about an axis that penetrates through the two circles on it's "north" and "south" end. From here, the entire plot is just exploring this obviously constructed device, and the exploits of the endeavor. Very hard to do justice in a synopsis since much of the book is describing events in detail and discussing the science (pretty good science to my understading) that governs this bizarre world. Also, at the start it seems like a derilect vessel that is cold and dead. As the crew investigates it comes more and more to life. Long story short, it's a hollow tube with airlocks on the north end for entry, and a parking space for vessels, it uses the spin to generate something akin to gravity, but at about .6 of earth's gravity. There is a large staircase that goes from the entrance/exit down to the "plane" which is of course the inside of a tube. Our human characters are able to walk somewhat comfortably, and the air contains enough oxygen for them to breathe comfortably. There's a sea that kind of bisects the tube with walls on either side. The southern sea has a wall many times higher than the northern one. They discover "biots" which were fragile specialized creatures that defied our neat categories for robots and living organisms. They seemed to spawn as needed conduct some task and then get reccyled back into the sea (the sea was all ice at the start and melted as it approached the sun). During the last of the exploring, they managed to find a sort of image catalog in some sort of prism display, kind of a hologram, and were able to see many regular-looking tools (forks knives) as well as some clothes. this betrayed some of the Raman's appearance, although they never saw a real Raman face or body. All we know is a rough size 2.5 meters and the fact that they have three legs and three arms. This mathced the threes patterns that seemed to organize most of the vessel. There was some drama with the Hermeans (people of mercury) who feared that Rama had some propulsion technology that we did not yet understand, and they might use it to become a new member of our solar system. They were especially worried since Rama was so close to the sun that they might dominate the solar system the way mercury currently did. They tried to nuke it but the crew of the endeavor stopped it from happening. Eventually, Rama did accellerate, but in a shocking twist for the people in the story, it accelerated toward the sun, gaining speed and launching itself back out of the solar system rather than making a home here. It's mechanism defied our understanding of physics, and it flew so close to the sun that it surely should have melted, but instead a protective barrier was formed around it by some other unknown and unexplained technology. Humans were even able to tell that Rama transferred some mass from the sun to itself during the process, as if it were recharging for the next leg of it's journey. The book ends with one of the scientists that has been advising from an office on the moon startling awake and remembering that the Ramans do everything in threes.
Takes
What I don't like
Not so much Honestly, I should rename this to "possible cons" I don't really think any of these are problems but Icould see why others wouldn't like the book because of it. This is not fair and not the point, but it's pretty light on the character stuff and some pretty poorly aged sexism makes a slight appearance. Not like a huge deal to me, honestly, I'm pretty chill with sexism (jk, but it wasn't that bad). The guy has a couple wives, and he's pretty horny for his coworkers, which is kinda weird, but I mostly just ignored it. Character development is totally not the point. I think there is actually some interesting characters, one of them is a sort of religious freak, he thinks Rama is like an intergalactic ark, and it's his main motivation for shutting down the Hermean nuke. That's cool. Boat lady is cool, they make a little raft and she captains the raft and there are some challenges. Telescope guy, anyway you get the point, the characters aren't like that interesting and their relationships are largely overlooked. I think that's fine because but for lots of people it may be a let down.
What I really liked
For many people this may be a con, but not that much happens. I think this makes a rather unbelievable story feel quite real. This is pretty much the most important thing that happens to anyone in the crew, maybe the most important event in the history of human civilization, and it's just kind of walking around on someone else's ship, taking notes until it zooms off. I think it works because so much of the descriptive stuff is fun so the relative inaction seems exactly how the real world happens. When we landed on the moon we just went up there, took some videos, hit a golf ball, planted a flag, drove around and came home. you know? We didn't discover some banished god on the dark side of the moon that had to be slain or the Earth would be devoured, we just did it and then it was over. Along those same lines, and probably my favorite part of the book is the fact that the Ramans are millenia ahead of us, and completely disinterested. It's such a refreshing alien story because: 1. We don't even meet an alien! Like what a genius idea! More than that, we don't get to know what they are, the universe just isn't going to answer all our questions for us, you know? 2. The aliens aren't here for us. Every other story is some "what if they come here to eat us" or whatever, and here they just don't care. The book makes a point of this and says something along the lines of "such monumental disinterest hurt worse than any intentional insult ever could" . There's something almost haunting about the fact that we could bump into another intelligent civilization and it still just not matter, we're still basically alone, but now we aren't even the only thing around. Right now it seems that the universe is either about us, or about nothing, but what if we're just like the guy in a movie scene who gets 3 frames where the back of his head is visible? I love the descriptions, the careful adherence to almost all of the known laws of physics. There's some magic, right at the end, but there's very little besides the "space drive" or the "bubble" that protects them while they absorb part of our sun (and I guess the tool that absorbs the sun and stores it somewhere) that is actively beyond our understanding of the universe. There are probably some technical things, like maybe you can't make a hollow tube that big? or like the replication rate of their little plankton equivalent guys is too fast. Plenty is left unexplained and might be beyond all possibility, but most of it seems plausible. Really excellent as far as "hard" science fiction goes. Also the descriptions are just beautiful, Clark does this thing where he sort of uses the character that is trying out different models for understanding such a bizzare world, so we get all the attempts described. Norton thinks of Rama as a vertical well, where he's at the bottom (northern entrance), then he flips it where it's a tube and he's walking down the stairs toward the bottom, and then again where he's at the top, like an ant clinging to the underside of a lid inside a water bottle. Anyway, a bunch of descriptions and then alternative interpretations so the reader gets to play with various visualizations. I hadn't seen that done in other books before, but I really like it, even as just a rhetorical device. I like the ending, the book notifies the reader countless times that the Ramans have done something in threes, so we really should have that relevation before the last line lands (although I failed in this regard). Either way, it lands pretty well, gave me goosebumps. Ok and the last thing, the twist where they leave, I think the setup here is really well done. The reader is sort of learning the nature of Rama with the characters, and if you're paying attention, you notice that we are constantly overlooking things (as the characters are) or completely misunderstanding the Raman's intentions. For example, early on one of the scientists points out that there will be hurricanes inside Rama, which is pretty cool and totally accurate, but he doesn't mention that the ice is going to melt "bottom up" or maybe more accurately "outside in" but regardless, there was going to be a disturbance as the water forms beneath the ice and stops supporting the ice above it, eventually crashing down in somewhat dramatic fashion. We also are encouraged to think of Rama as a vacant ship that failed to deliver it's inhabitants to their final destination. It did seem awfully dead, no microbes whatsover, but of course, what if the ship were behaving exactly as planned? That idea is never really broached by the characters and I suppose the reader is supposed to arrive at that possibility by themselves. This happens often enough, that the reader should probably catch the twist before it happens. The Hermeans are worried that Rama is all about us, joining our solar system, after all, they were aimed directly at us, that implies some level of intention. But the actual information that we get from Rama indicated that they didn't care about us at all, so why would that be the case. Anyway, it's just a good delivery. I was left with the impression that I should have expected it even though I didn't, which is kinda the perfect place for a twist to land.