Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke is surely one of the main names who put the “science” in “science fiction.”

This man was arguably a bit weak on the “fiction” part at times – not the most successfully dramatic or poetic of writers – but damn, could he science.

Clarke would have held the patent on the concept of satellite communication – if his patent lawyer had not told him the concept was too outlandish to even pursue.

In “Rendezvous with Rama,” he brings this unique mastery of actual science into science fiction – in a story where crises are resolved, and questions about the very nature of life, the Universe, and everything are at least partially answered – by mastery of the equations of physics, which dictate such things as speed and gravity.

Going back to Clarke after reading many other authors was arguably a bit odd for me – precisely because of the lack of drama and poetry. Clarke’s chapters unfold like mechanical clockwork, each one driven by a specific event and the characters’ reactions to it. Although Clarke delivers biting and often impressively insightful descriptions of his characters, there is little real interpersonal drama or anguish; as in many Clarke stories, everyone performs their jobs flawlessly, and no real or violent disagreements are to be had.

Except, perhaps, with the laws of physics. The massive extraterrestrial spaceship which humans dub “Rama” provides more than enough drama and suspense, as it goes about its own inscrutable workings and the humans exploring it try to figure out what will and will not kill them.

One of the most fascinating things to me, as with all of Clarke’s work, was to see how “Rendezvous with Rama” has aged.

I have had this sensation often when reading Clarke’s work – it last happened when I was reading “Childhood’s End,” and wondered why he was explaining in such great detail how oral contraceptive pills and paternity tests work.

And then I flipped to the front cover and realized that the book had been written in 1951; Clarke was explaining these perfectly pedestrian, commonplace things to his audience because they had not actually been invented when he wrote the book.

So Clarke was very right about the future, in some respects.

In “Rendezvous” I encountered this sensation again, as Clarke mixed concepts which seemed to me perfectly logical and predictable (such as “biots,” which the characters were shocked to discover were not robots, but engineered life forms), to things which seemed utterly inscrutable and actually awe-inspiring.

The sense of awe is something which Clarke is very, very good at. He may fall flat when attempting to describe human romance, but nobody paints the skies of Jupiter, or the corona of the Sun, like he does.

And, more key still, nobody impresses the importance of those things to the human mind in quite the same way.

Clarke’s characters have no idea what to expect when they walk into the spaceship Rama. Is it a ghost ship, its inhabitants long-dead? Is it an invasion force? A colony world?

None of these questions are actually answered, but as our human explorers unearth some tiny fraction of Rama’s secrets, what is left un-answered seems all the more awe-inspiring.

And as I, as a modern reader, view this from my oh-look-how-many-more-things-are-possible-now perspective – I truly wonder what will be possible in the technological future, like that which Rama’s creators seem to have come from.