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Rendezvous with Rama
Earthlings are confronted and confounded by an alien culture
Arthur C. Clarke won the 1974 Hugo Award and 1973 Nebula Award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. And for good reason. The book examines man’s most compelling curiosity to meet and communicate with an race totally alien to earth.
The book is set in the second decade of the next millennium, the year 2131. In the summer of 2077, earth had been devastated by a large meteor that struck Italy destroying the cities and populations of Padua and Verona, 600,000 people in all perished. In the years since, the world had created project Spaceguard, a network of radar systems on Mars that has cataloged every asteroid or other space debris that could possible pose a threat to earth.
It was Spaceguard that detected the strange object "while it was still outside the orbit of Jupiter. There was nothing unusual about its location; many asteroids went beyond Saturn before turning once more toward their distant master, the Sun… But a first radar contact at such a distance was unprecedented; clearly 31/439 (year and numerical number of the object Spaceguard used to catalog the object) must be of exceptional size."
An extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Council was called and the assembled scientist decided to send a space probe to intercept the object and determine its composition. As the probe grew near the object, on earth a billion television sets observed "a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe—one with centers fifty kilometers apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the center of the one face, and were twenty kilometers across; from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama (the object’s new name) looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler."
Thus, began mankind’s quest to understand this strange object called Rama as it sped through earth’s solar system on a mission and destination only it knows. The spaceship Endeavor under Commander Norton was dispatched to intercept and determine the mission of this strange object.
Imagine confronting an alien entity with an advanced technology but having no way to communicate with the entity. You only have your observations of what goes on within this world of Rama to guide you in your understanding. You come across what is obviously a complete database of information on this world but you have nothing to use to interpret or understand the data. Such is the fate of Norton and his crew as they attempt in vain to wrest secrets from the world of Rama.
In reality Rendezvous with Rama has less to do with Rama than it has to do with humankind. For humans the greatest frustration is finding another intelligent culture and having no way to engage it. In many ways the earthlings of Clarke’s book resemble castaways on a lonely island and Rama is a rescue ship from some advanced culture. Only there is no one on the ship to appeal to for help.
This book is so compelling you can read it in an afternoon. In fact, once you get into the story, you can’t stop reading. The book touches a nerve that is within us all and it is for this reason that it holds the reader so intently.
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