1973 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. In 2131, an
object falls into the inner Solar System at high speed: it turns out
to be an alien artefact, and only one ship is in a position to take a
look before it falls out again.
It is traditional to excoriate Clarke for not really having
characters in his books, and to a large extent this is true. But
given some of the books I've read recently, and the damage done by
their failed attempts at characterisation, I find a book like this –
which doesn't even try to flesh out the characters beyond a few
traits – preferable to one that tries and fails. This is a world that,
for example, has largely overcome sexual hang-ups, and therefore the
people in it don't feel the need to go on and on and on about how they
don't have sexual hang-ups. Revolutionary! (Of the two female crew
who are mentioned, one is the ship's doctor, which one might regard as
a traditionally "caring" job… but the other one isn't, and that's
already rather better than several other books in this re-read have
managed.)
The design of Rama obviously, to my modern eye, prefigures Gerard
O'Neill's Island Three cylindrical space colony of 1976; there are
clear similarities, but I suspect they flow from the basic constraint
of using the inside surface of a spun cylinder to simulate gravity,
such as having the entry point on the axis, and having light sources
at ground level to illuminate the opposite side of the space.
Even more than the prototypical huge enigmatic alien artefact story
Ringworld, this book doesn't give big answers: who built the thing?
What's it for? We aren't going to find out, and to some extent that's
the point; bits of the technology can be more or less understood, but
not in detail, and the major questions remain mysterious. When one
considers how much easier it is to generate interest and excitement
with enigmas than it is to keep that excitement while explaining them,
this also seems a wise choice. (In the same year, the revised edition
of Profiles of the Future gave the world Clarke's Third Law: "Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
Rama ends up being confusing, but rarely eerie, which is a tricky line
to take and one that works well.
Pacing is very tight, but there's little in the way of an overall
story: the book mostly deals with a series of incidents, one at a
time, resolving each before going on to the next. (If one were to
adapt it to visual media, it would make a better episodic TV series
than a film.) The writing is always dry, often in narration rather
than speech, with competent people doing their thing and not
panicking... you know, like real space crew rather than the
Hollywood version. The book always conveys a fascination with the
object itself, to the point that the characters are primarily tools to
serve the author's purpose of exploratory description in much the same
way that Rama's autonomous servitor mechanisms are tools to keep it
maintained; it's clear that questions like "how do you have a large
body of water aboard a hollow cylindrical spaceship without it getting
completely out of control" were more important than any personal
stories.
Followed by Gentry Lee's Rama II and other sequels, which among
other grievous sins commit the cardinal error of explaining things.
Reread for Neil Bowers'
Hugo-Nebula Joint Winners Reread,
and this is the first of those rereads that has really held up for me
now.
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