Rama lama, rama lama ding dong

Review of Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (New York: Del Rey, 1984). 276 pp. Paperback.

In 2077, an asteroid falls on Italy, killing millions and eradicating centuries of art and history. To prevent this from happening again, an early-warning system is set up to monitor deep-space objects. 54 years later, "Project Spaceguard" detects an object, dubbed "Rama," entering the solar system. It turns out to be no random comet, but a featureless cylinder 20 kilometers in diameter and 50 long. Clearly this is no natural phenomenon—it's a spaceship.

A survey ship, Endeavour, is sent out to investigate Rama. They land on the "northern" (front) end and discover the entrance, through a triple airlock. The interior is pitch-dark, but gravity is produced by Rama's rotation, and the air is breathable, if cold and sterile. The interior surface is a featureless cylindrical plain apart from a few city-like structures and a huge band of ice the crew of Endeavour name the "Cylindrical Sea." It isn't long before Rama, drifting closer to the sun, begins to show signs of thawing out and developing an ecosystem. Rama is starting to come to life.

I believe my paperback copy of Rendezvous with Rama may be the first novel I ever bought for myself, from the Classic Bookshop at Pearson International Airport, sometime in the mid- to late-1980s. Given my enjoyment of authors like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and Lee Child, I'm sure it touched off a lifetime love of airport novels. While I don't remember the details of that trip (or if it was even me doing the flying), I do remember being completely thrilled by Rama—enough to re-read it once or twice during my later teen years.

Yet, now, re-reading it thirty-odd years later, I'm hard pressed to recognize what teenage me found so fascinating about it. I'm not saying it's a bad book. But, clearly, thirty more years of life (and arguably an undergraduate degree in English, although that hasn't really changed my reading preferences overall) have evolved my literary tastes somewhat.

The idea of Rama itself is the novel's main appeal: a gigantic, artificial planetoid, its origins, purpose, and inhabitants unknown. It's a classic Big Dumb Object (BDO), a common Clarke trope (along with the unseen aliens that manufactured it). It's fun traveling along with Endeavour's crew as they discover new features of Rama, and have to figure out what they are/if they're dangerous/how to get past them.

On the other hand, the characters are fairly flat¹ and interchangeable. The interplanetary politics seem similarly poorly developed; they're there to create some conflict where otherwise there would be none. One government tries to blow up Rama with a nuclear missile. Rather than pose a serious threat, it's easily defeated by the crew of Endeavour. The first couple books of James S. A. Corey's Expanse series tell a very similar story to Rendezvous with Rama, but with more fully developed characters and more plausible conflict between the solar system's various colonies.

Rendezvous with Rama won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1974—Clarke's first for a novel, and second overall—as well as the Nebula Award for Best Novel the same year. Weaknesses notwithstanding, it's a classic of hard science fiction and well worth the read if you need to pass the time.

Footnote

¹ Well-rounded footnote: Though not every character is entirely flat: "Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin." (Rendezvous with Rama, Chapter 11)