Rendezvous with Rama: review

Artist's rendition of Rama's interior, where things look vaguely familiar yet aren't anything we know.

[WARNING:  spoilers.]

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was a British science-fiction author perhaps most famous for his 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was, in fact, written in tandem with the making of the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name. Clarke went on to write 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. The first story was inspired by and an expansion of his 1948 short story The Sentinel. Clarke authored various short-story collections as well as other novels, which brings us to his 1973 work Rendezvous with Rama, which is about the arrival of a huge, cylindrical alien spacecraft in our solar system.

The year is 2131, and humanity has begun to expand its territory to include other parts of our local passel of worlds. Venus, with its hostile environment, remains unconquered, but humanity has outposts on Mercury, the moon, and other places. The resulting home-and-diaspora civilization is collectively called the United Planets, which has a far-reaching scanning system to detect asteroids and other objects passing through the system. Scans pick up a large object that quickly turns out to be an alien artifact, dubbed "Rama" after the Hindu god. A team of astronauts on the nearest human space vessel, the Endeavor, is tasked with exploring the object, which appears to be on a rough course to the sun.

The astronauts quickly discover that the vessel is rife with triple-redundancy systems: a triple airlock to get in is the first thing the humans encounter. Once inside the cylinder, which turns out to be an artificial world much along the lines of so-called generation ships, the team discovers a vast, cylindrical interior with "gravity"—inertial force—varying from zero gee along the cylinder's central axis to a healthy fraction of a gee at the cylinder's walls thanks to the cylinder's spin. Much of the story is devoted to an exploration of the land, with its mysterious city-like structures whose function remains unknown, and the eventual appearance of what are termed "biots," creatures that appear to be both biological and mechanically robotic. There is also a vast, kilometers-wide "cylindrical sea" in the very center of Rama, at its "waistline," that forms a complete circle around the cylinder's middle interior, dividing Rama into two great "northern" and "southern" sections, i.e., fore and aft, which the astronauts call "continents." The sea is frozen at first, but as Rama approaches perihelion, the sea warms up, begins to melt, and even helps to produce hurricane-like effects in the interior atmosphere, which turns out to be breathable. The city-like structures that resemble tall buildings but harbor no life are given names that correspond to Earth's cities: New York, Paris, etc. The astronauts take pains to record every discovery they make, and a United Planets science commission is monitoring the team's every move.

The planet Mercury, whose human citizens are known as Hermians (based on Hermes, i.e., Mercury), decides that Rama is too dangerous and sends a missile with a manually detonating nuke out to the object in case it should prove hostile. One member of the Endeavor's crew turns out to be a type of "Cosmic Christian" who thinks Rama might be an ark sent by God to take the righteous away; this same crew member flies out and disarms the Hermian missile. The United Planets science commission debates Rama's purpose while the on-site team of astronauts continues to make discoveries, including the discovery of a collection of holographic images showing various objects—some seemingly familiar, some not.

In the end, though, the humans must leave Rama before it gets too close to the sun, and as they depart, they watch as the ship skims past our solar system's star, forming a mysterious shield around itself while also creating a tunnel-shaped course through the sun's corona by which it seems to gather energy for what turns out to be the next stage of its interstellar voyage through space—a voyage that may already have lasted millions of years. Did Rama's inhabitants die out, leaving only "biots" in its place? Were the biots themselves the "life" to be encountered by the humans? None of this is answered by the end, and the story concludes with Rama being just as mysterious as when it was first encountered, but with the knowledge that the Ramans, whoever they were/are, do everything in threes.

Rendezvous with Rama is about what happens when flawed humans, with their own weird preconceptions and prejudices, meet up with the unknown. While the novel turned out to be a shaggy-dog story for me, with no definite conclusion, I found the exploration of the alien artifact interesting enough, and I have to wonder how director Denis Villeneuve intends to adapt Clarke's novel into a movie. I'm looking forward to Villeneuve's version of Rama, just as I'm looking forward to the movie version of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, which is reported to star Ryan Gosling in yet another astronaut role (he starred in "First Man" as Neil Armstrong). Rendezvous with Rama is hard science fiction that also manages to be eerie and ineffable. It's a good, entertaining read.