A few weeks back, there was a thread discussing Arthur C. Clarkes’s Childhood’s End. I remembered having read Childhood’s End a few years back, and, on seeing this thread, decided to read the book again. As before, I liked it a lot. So when, in the aforementioned thread, someone recommended Rendevous with Rama as another good Clarke book, I went out and bought that to.
Having just read it, I have to admit that I don’t see what was so great about it. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it. I did enjoy the writing style, and Clarke did a good job of making fantastic events seem plausible. It’s clear that he put a lot thought into what Rama should really be like. I liked how he would pose some problem for the characters, and then come up with some clever solution (as, for example, when one of the crewmen gets trapped on the Southern Hemicylinder).
But other than this, the book didn’t really have much of a pay off. First of all, there is no significant character development or conflict. Second, we never learn anything about where Rama is going, where it came from, or what the Ramans are like. Childhood’s End and 2001 also posed many mysteries, but in the case of Childhood’s End, many of the mysteries were provided with amazing and unpredictable, yet plausible, solutions, while in 2001 the unresolved mysteries served as a spring board for questions about the nature and origin of humanity. In contrast, not only were the mysteries in Rendevous with Rama never answered, but we were never even given any particular reason to think of them as significant mysteries.
I’m sure that many of the mysteries left unresolved in Rendevous with Rama are answered in the sequels (which I obviously haven’t read), but my understanding is that Clarke had no intention of writing sequels when he wrote the original Rama book. So, standing on its own, what was so significant about this book?
I apologize for my carelessness. I had intended to post this in Cafe Society, not in the Pit. I would be very grateful if a moderator would move this thread there (or close it so that I can re-post it in Cafe Society, if that is the prefered procedure). Thank you.
Clarke himself didn’t realise the ripeness of the book for sequels until a few years ago. Then, writing with Gentry Lee, he wrote what is the most un-Clarke like sequel I could imagine. I’m a diehard Clarke fan and I hated the sequels. YMMV.
What Clarke has always excelled at is suspending the disbelief involved with the technology. You always believe that the tech Clarke writes about is just around the corner, which it frequently is.
In any event, there are many other very good Clarke novels, don’t stop here.
What I found most appealing was the sheer breadth of his imagination, fitted into the POV of perfectly normal people.
You might want to avoid “Fountains of Paradise” (which I love, by the way). It is similar in that has rather bare bones plots and characters, and is more a think piece on how all the cool stuff would work or appear to work.
It might have been more traditional to have some climax to the book’s plot, but in my opinion, Clarke’s book was more realistic the way it was written. An unknown artifact appears, it’s investigated as thoroughly as its brief passage through the solar syatem allows, and then it departs. It would be unrealistic to expect that such an event would produce definitive answers.
On a literary note, any attempt on Clarke’s part to actually answer the questions he raised would have been disappointing. Once the mystery is solved, the solution is usually less interesting than the original mystery. Clarke knew that the Ramans, like the Heechee in Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, worked better if they stayed offstage.
<sigh> It feels like I’m the only one in the world that not just liked the sequels, but adored them. I especially loved “Rama Revealed”.
When I first read “Rendevous With Rama”, I was a little puzzled about what it was supposed to be. By itself, its a good mystery story, with very little resolution. What really got me was the level of detail that Clarke wrote for the actual inside of the ship. I could imagine quite vividly what it looked like from the descriptions of the interior.
Well, I hate to sound like a broken record in discussing Clarke, but I think the evidence of Childhood’s End, 2001, and Rendezvous with Rama is clear: Clarke occasionally enjoys dealing with setting and theme, even at the expense of plot and characterization.
Exactly!! Little Nemo and The Bad Astronomer put it well (and I’ll just reiterate again). The mystery is the point. That book left me with a wonderful feeling that I had no idea what Rama was about. Nothing. Not all mysteries are easily solvable and not all situations are easily understandable by people. The crew was entirely out of their element, and after it was all over they had gotten nowhere.
I don’t know, it sounds like a show about nothing… but hopefully you get my drift.
When I read Rama it reminded me of Star Trek IV (I’m sure the artists/writers for the film got their inspiration at least in part from Rama). The plot of that movie can be summed up as follows:
Alien ship aproaches.
Alien ship leaves.
In the meantime we figure out that it communicates with whales, but we don’t know what it’s saying.
Not only that, but that ship is also a giant cylander.
i read it in high school, in our Sci-fi class. i thought it was pretty good (but not as good as A Princess of Mars, obviously). Clarke made a pretty realistic sounding example (if dated) of mysteroius object/small band of explorers story. my teacher liked pointing out themes similar to star trek in books and movies, so he was on a kick that the guy from the Space Jesus church was the book’s Spock character. I did figure our the last lines would be on the line of “the Ramans do everything in threes.” i never bothered with the sequals, thinking the book should be left alone (and if Clarke wasn’t going to write them himself, then what is the point of a half-hearted sequal where stooge writer does all the work?)
I loved the original, and was bitterly disappointed by the first sequel. If there are any others, I ain’t reading them! Clarke should have quit while he was ahead.
I enjoyed the sequels, although Gentry Lee’s Catholicism got fairl obnoxious. The original, however, is a masterpiece of hard sci-fi–utterly plausible, and utterly enigmatic. What, like you expect to be able to figure out everything there is to know about a big ass alien spaceship on cruise control in just a week?
I probably read Rendezvous With Rama at just the wrong time. Part of the point of the book is the “gee whiz, it’s artificial, but it’s so friggin’ HUGE!” theme.
…But I read it right after I read Ringworld.
Still, it was great hard sf, but it carries the taint of the sequels.
To be fair, all I’ve read of the sequels is the first half of Rama II or Return to Rama or whatever the second book is called, and I just couldn’t take the page after page of lame Hardy Boys characterization of the second Rama crew: “…as Nicole brushed back her raven-dark hair, anger flashed behind her green eyes…”
Memo to Lee & Clarke: nobody cares about Nicole or her ex-husband. We want to see the ship!