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Rendezvous with Rama Kindle Edition
An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth’s solar system on a collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system name Rama. What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization far more advanced than ours. They find an interior stretching over fifty kilometers; a forbidding cylindrical sea; mysterious and inaccessible buildings; and strange machine-animal hybrids, or “biots,” that inhabit the ship. But what they don’t find is an alien presence. So who—and where—are the Ramans?
Often listed as one of Clarke’s finest novels, Rendezvous with Rama won numerous awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Jupiter, and the British Science Fiction Awards. A fast-paced and compelling story of an enigmatic encounter with alien technology, Rendezvous with Rama offers both answers and unsolved mysteries that will continue to fascinate readers for generations.
“Mr. Clarke is splendid . . . We experience that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable, that distinguishes SF at its most technically imaginative.” —The New York Times
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRosettaBooks
- Publication dateNovember 30, 2012
- File size393 KB
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Rendezvous with Rama
By Arthur Charles ClarkeChivers Audio Books
Copyright © 2001 Arthur Charles ClarkeAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780745167398
Spaceguard
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers--a margin invisibly small by the Stan•dards of the universe. On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.
In those days there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably
At 0946 GMT on the morning of September 11 in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the Sun, and as it moved across the heavens-at first in utter silence-it left behind it a churning column of dust and smoke.
Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones.
Moving at fifty kilometers a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labor of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the Earth; and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landward after the hammer blow from space.
Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science-to the whole human race, for the rest of time-was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning; and few could draw much pleasure from the fact that, as the dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets since Krakatoa.
After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand years-but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences could be even worse.
Very well; there would be no next time.
A hundred years earlier, a much poorer world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind against itself. The effort had never been successful, but the skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now they could be used for a far nobler purpose, and on an infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach the defenses of Earth.
So began Project Spaceguard. Fifty years later-and in a way that none of its designers could ever have anticipated -it justified its existence.
Intruder
By the year 2130, the Mars-based radars were discovering new asteroids at the rate of a dozen a day. The Spaceguard computers automatically calculated their orbits and stored the
information in their own enormous memories, so that every few months any interested
astronomer could have a look at the accumulated statistics. These were now quite impressive.
It had taken more than 120 years to collect the first thousand asteroids, since the discovery of Ceres, largest of these tiny worlds, on the very first day of the nineteenth century. Hundreds had been found and lost and found again; they existed in such swarms that one exasperated astronomer had christened them "vermin of the skies." He would have been appalled to know that Spaceguard was now keeping track of half a million.
Only the five giants-Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Eunomia, and Vesta-were more than two hundred kilometers in diameter; the vast majority were merely oversized boulders that would fit into a small park. Almost all moved in orbits that lay beyond Mars. Only the few that came far enough sunward to be a possible danger to Earth were the concern of Spaceguard. And not one in a thousand of these, during the entire future history of the solar system, would pass within a million kilometers of Earth.
The object first catalogued as 31/439, according to the year and the order of its discovery, was detected 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. And Thule II, most far-ranging of all, traveled so close to Uranus that it might
well be a lost moon of that planet.
But a first radar contact at such a distance was unprecedented; clearly, 31/439 must be of
exceptional size. From the strength of the echo, the computers deduced a diameter of at least
forty kilometers. Such a giant had not been discovered for a hundred years. That it had been
overlooked for so long seemed incredible.
Then the orbit was calculated, and the mystery was resolved-to be replaced by a greater one.
31/439 was not traveling on a normal asteroidal path, along an ellipse which it retraced with clockwork precision every few years. It was a lonely wanderer among the stars, making its first and last visit to the solar system-for it was moving so swiftly that the gravitational field of the Sun could never capture it. It would flash inward past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury, gaining speed as it did so, until it rounded the Sun and headed out once again into the unknown.
It was at this point that the computers started flashing their "We have something interesting" sign, and, for the first time, 31/439 came to the attention of human beings. There was a brief flurry of excitement at Spaceguard headquarters, and the interstellar vagabond was quickly dignified by a name instead of a mere number. Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and Roman mythology; now they were working through the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened Rama.
For a few days, the news media made a fuss over the visitor, but they were badly handicapped by the sparsity of information. Only two facts were known about Rama: its unusual orbit and its approximate size. Even this last was merely an educated guess, based upon the strength of the radar echo. Through the telescope, Rama still appeared as a faint, fifteenth-magnitude star-much too small to show a visible disc. But as it plunged in toward the heart of the solar system, it would grow brighter and larger month by month; before it vanished forever, the orbiting observatories would be able to gather more precise information about its shape and size. There was plenty of time, and perhaps during the next few years some spaceship on its ordinary business might be routed close enough to get good photographs. An actual rendezvous was most unlikely; the energy cost would be far too great to permit physical contact with an object cutting across the orbits of the planets at more than a hundred thousand kilometers an hour.
So the world soon forgot about Rama. But the astronomers did not. Their excitement grew with the passing months as the new asteroid presented them with more and more puzzles.
First of all, there was the problem of Rama's light curve. It didn't have one.
All known asteroids, without exception, showed a slow variation in their brilliance, waxing and waning in a period of a few hours. It had been recognized for more than two centuries that this was an inevitable result of their spin and their irregular shape. As they toppled end over end along their orbits, the reflecting surfaces they presented to the sun were continually changing, and their brightness varied accordingly.
Rama showed no such changes. Either it was not spinning at all or it was perfectly symmetrical. Both explanations seemed unlikely.
There the matter rested for several months, because none of the big orbiting telescopes could be spared from their regular job of peering into the remote depths of the universe. Space astronomy was an expensive hobby, and time on a large instrument could easily cost a thousand dollars a minute. Dr. William Stenton would never have been able to grab the Farside two-hundred-meter reflector for a full quarter of an hour if a more important program had not been temporarily derailed by the failure of a fifty-cent capacitor. One astronomer's bad luck was his good fortune
Stenton did not know what he had caught until the next day, when he was able to get computer time to process his results. Even when they were finally flashed on his display screen, it took him several minutes to understand what they meant
The sunlight reflected from Rama was not, after all, absolutely constant in its intensity. There was a very small variation-hard to detect, but quite unmistakable, and extremely regular. Like all the other asteroids, Raina was indeed spinning. But whereas the normal "day" for an asteroid was several hours, Rama's was only four minutes.
Stenton did some quick calculations, and found it hard to believe the results. At its equator, this tiny world must be spinning at more than a thousand kilometers an hour. It would be rather unhealthy to attempt a landing anywhere except at the poles, because the centrifugal force at the equator would be powerful enough to flick any loose objects away from it at an acceleration of almost one gravity. ltama was a roiling stone that could never have gathered any cosmic moss. It was surprising that such a body had managed to hold itself together, and had not long ago shattered into a million fragments.
An object forty kilometers across, with a rotation period of only four minutes-where did that fit into the astronomical scheme of things? Dr. Stenton was a somewhat imaginative man, a little too prone to jump to conclusions. He now jumped to one that gave him an uncomfortable few minutes indeed:
The only specimen of the celestial zoo that fitted this description was a collapsed star. Perhaps Rama was a dead sun, a madly spinning sphere of neutronium, every cubic centimeter weighing billions of tons.
At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. 0. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy. Across more than two centuries of time it had lost none of its magic and its tenor. He would never forget the images of hurricanes and' tidal waves, of cities sliding into the sea, as that other visitor from the stars smashed into Jupiter and then fell sunward past the Earth. True, the star that old Wells described was not cold, but incandescent, and wrought much of its destruction by heat. That scarcely mattered; even if Rama was a cold body, reflecting only the light of the Sun, it could kill by gravity as easily as by fire.
Any stellar mass intruding into the solar system would completely distort the orbits of the planets. The Earth had only to move a few million kilometers sunward-.or starward-for the
delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The antarctic icecap could melt and flood all low-lying land; or the oceans could freeze and the whole world be locked in eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough.
Then Stenton relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief. This was all nonsense; he should be ashamed of himself.
Rama could not possibly be made of condensed matter. No star-sized mass could penetrate so deeply into the solar system without producing disturbances that would have betrayed it long ago. The orbits of all the planets would have been affected; that, after all, was how Neptune, Pluto, and Persephone had been discovered. No, it was utterly impossible for an object as massive as a dead sun to sneak up unobserved.
In a way, it was a pity. An encounter with a dark star would have been quite exciting.
While it lasted.
Continues...
Excerpted from Rendezvous with Ramaby Arthur Charles Clarke Copyright © 2001 by Arthur Charles Clarke. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B07XD75HGV
- Publisher : RosettaBooks (November 30, 2012)
- Publication date : November 30, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 393 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 259 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #12,979 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
SIR ARTHUR C. CLARKE (1917-2008) wrote the novel and co-authored the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and he is the only science-fiction writer to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. His fiction and nonfiction have sold more than one hundred million copies in print worldwide.
Photo by en:User:Mamyjomarash (Amy Marash) (en:Image:Clarke sm.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the content excellent at evoking a sense of wonder with scientific and technological speculations. They also describe the story as nice, brilliant, and classic. Readers describe the writing quality as very well written and approachable. Opinions are mixed on the plot, pacing, and character development. Some find it intriguing, engrossing, fresh, and enjoyable, while others say it's ponderous and slow.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the story nice, fun for sci-fi fans, and suspenseful. They also appreciate the classic nature and hard physics.
"This book that is 12 years old is more dynamic and superior in so many ways to anything I have found currently written on this site in the Unlimited..." Read more
"...the novel from being entirely satisfying, but there is still enough interesting, serious science in Rendezvous with Rama to make it well worth..." Read more
"...The story is very well written and well thought out. The premise is plausible, in the future, but not with our current technology...." Read more
"...technology is probably a touch off after 50 years, but the basic physics still works. it’s classic old-fashioned hard-core science fiction." Read more
Customers find the content excellent at evoking a sense of wonder, relatable, and cool science. They also appreciate the scientific roots to the theories and images. Readers also say the book is unique and easy to read. They say it quietly draws them in and keeps them fascinated.
"This book that is 12 years old is more dynamic and superior in so many ways to anything I have found currently written on this site in the Unlimited..." Read more
"...The story is very well written and well thought out. The premise is plausible, in the future, but not with our current technology...." Read more
"...wry wit that combines into a cohesive package offering frequent moments of casual brilliance that will please readers new and old...." Read more
"...Rama is excellent at evoking a sense of wonder. Clarke manages to convey the artifact's grandeur and to create a uniquely bizarre alien world...." Read more
Customers find the book well-written, approachable, and easy to read. They also say it's compulsory reading for everyone, with a great story told in a classical dispassionate manner.
"...I really enjoyed this book. The characters were interesting and well written...." Read more
"...Male dominated thinking and characters that are a sign of his time. Approachable, easy to read and often exciting." Read more
"...I liked the author's writing style, could combination of science fiction and storytelling there's a few good characters to serve as a base...." Read more
"...for an entire genre and for that reason alone it is compulsory reading for everyone...." Read more
Customers find the imagery in the book enjoyable, lucid, and evocative. They also say the story feels true and alive, as if reported from an actual happening.
"...and while understandably a little dated, it never loses its grandeur and epic spectacle. Looking forward to the film!" Read more
"...status is immediately recognized as deserved and his attention to detail is just right enough to both satisfy and spur wonder...." Read more
"...Arthur Clarke always wrote with a refreshing clarity and simplicity that is to a reader as cool water in the desert." Read more
"...Mr. Clarke paints a fantastic world with Rama. It's very vivid and alive. He does very well in transporting you there...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the plot. Some find it exciting, with human themes and cool science. They also say it strikes the reader with fear and wonder, creating a uniquely bizarre alien world. However, others say the novel never delivers that moment of wonder, is extreme, and has no actual plot, character development, or theme. They mention the book may be a bit slow and uneventful for some, and ends abruptly.
"...Clarke manages to convey the artifact's grandeur and to create a uniquely bizarre alien world...." Read more
"...on four now, as there were times whilst reading it that I felt slightly bored, but this feels like more of a 'me problem' rather than any problem..." Read more
"...Approachable, easy to read and often exciting." Read more
"...None of them are interesting AT ALL. He could have just had robots exploring the ship and the story would be no different...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the character development. Some find the characters well-developed, while others say they're not very developed.
"...And it doesn't help that Clarke's characters are utterly boring with zero character development and zero character arc...." Read more
"Very good book. I really enjoyed this book. The characters were interesting and well written...." Read more
"Great premise, good pacing, and awesome, fun world-building. Characters are a bit shallow and dialog feels a little stiff, but that's not the star..." Read more
"...That said, the characters in Rama are surprisingly serviceable, if not great. Commander Norton gets enough backstory to make him relatable...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the pacing of the book. Some mention it's fast paced and engaging, while others say it'll take you a while to get through it.
"...And clocking in at just over two hundred pages, he keeps the pace up, too...." Read more
"...As such, the book may be a bit slow and uneventful for some. Well, maybe not uneventful because a lot is actually happening...." Read more
"Wonderful story. Slow build, thought-provoking but not in a very serious way...." Read more
"...the book with superlatives last time round, today I felt it was slow moving, ponderous, and ultimately disappointingly underachieving...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the dated content. Some mention that it didn't seem dated, while others say that it's a bit dated. They also say that the storyline is never fully developed and the character development is mediocre.
"...And even though this is 12 years ago written, it was not dated at all...." Read more
"...The writing, the words used, descriptions...all are outrageously dated to somebody who thrived in the 1960-1980s in USA...." Read more
"...years after it was first written, this is fresh and enjoyable and not at all dated...." Read more
"...It’s a relatively small section, but it has aged poorly and only serves to highlight that nearly all of Clarke’s characters are men...." Read more
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The novel begins in the year 2131. By that time, mankind has established colonies on several planets and moons in the solar system. The government of Earth has also developed a system to track the trajectories of asteroids that may potentially impact with Earth or its colonies. (We now have the beginnings of such a warning system, but none existed when Clarke wrote the book in the ‘70s.) The Spaceguard system detects an unusual object heading toward the inner solar system. This celestial body is named Rama, after a Hindu deity. A calculation of Rama’s trajectory indicates that it has come from outside our solar system—a true interstellar visitor. Scientists deem Rama worthy of investigation and divert an existing unmanned space probe to perform a flyby. The first photos taken by the probe reveal that Rama is more than just an unusual asteroid. It is a rotating cylinder, fifty kilometers long and twenty kilometers in diameter, so geometrically perfect it could only have been created by an advanced intelligent civilization.
The nearest manned spacecraft, the Endeavour, is sent to investigate. The crew only has a short period of time to examine Rama before its course takes it out of our solar system. Landing on one of the flat ends of the cylinder, the crew finds an entrance to the spacecraft and proceeds to explore its interior. Though technologically advanced, Rama appears to be uninhabited, but the expedition nevertheless searches for archaeological evidence of the spacecraft’s creators.
The problem with Rendezvous with Rama is that it never really lives up to its philosophical potential. This isn’t really so much a novel about what it would be like to find evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. The bulk of the book is just Clarke describing what it would be like to live inside a giant rotating cylinder—the gravity, the climate, the atmosphere, the logistics of getting around, and so on. For example, there are three or four chapters devoted entirely to descriptions of staircases and the astronauts’ challenges in traversing them. Is that really necessary? And is that really what anyone is hoping for when they pick up a book like this? Clarke is so obsessed with the physics of this cylindrical spaceship that the idea of alien intelligence or extraterrestrial archaeology doesn’t seem to hold much interest for him.
Mankind underwent a Rendezvous with Rama moment in 2017, when an interstellar object with unusual characteristics, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in our solar system. Rather than a cylinder, it was shaped more like a pancake. This is not the year 2131, however, and we don’t have a surplus of spacecraft out studying the solar system, so we’ll never know for sure if ‘Oumuamua could have been our Rama. The opening chapters of Rendezvous with Rama provide a commendably realistic look at how the process of investigating an interstellar craft might actually proceed. As the novel goes on, however, it starts to dilute its realism by accumulating sci-fi novel cliches, like the captain’s space romance with a buxom female scientist and an act of war between feuding planets. Such tropes prevent the novel from being entirely satisfying, but there is still enough interesting, serious science in Rendezvous with Rama to make it well worth reading.
Anyhow, who doesn't love a getting a classic science-fiction novel for Christmas?? Clarke has been on my list for as long as I've been aware of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and with the recent news that Rendezvous with Rama may be Denis Villeneuve's next project after he's finished with Dune, what better time for such a sweet gift?
I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I enjoyed this novel. There is always a slight worry—at least for me there is—that classic novels will not hold up to the scrutiny of a contemporary gaze. Not so with Rama. Not so at all. Clarke weaves his unknowable cosmic journey with a not-at-all-concealed intelligence and a wry wit that combines into a cohesive package offering frequent moments of casual brilliance that will please readers new and old. It's true that the character work is nothing to write home about, but that simply wasn't Clarke's focus. Rama is hard sci-fi of the highest order. It is one hundred percent about the science, and yet Clarke keeps things fun and engaging (science is fun? who knew). And clocking in at just over two hundred pages, he keeps the pace up, too. There are no real lulls here, as the crew of the Endeavour explores a brand new world.
Clarke's strongest offering here is the sheer sense of exploration the reader gets. The reader himself is a discoverer of an alien artifact of unimaginable magnitude. The reader herself embarks on an unknowable cosmic journey as a sleeping giant awakes. It's a ride worth taking.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Mexico on June 18, 2024
The story itself is engrossing. The sense of mystery runs through the whole work, and in that way, it's ending is pleasing. You get many answers, including to some technical wondering of Rama, but never get a purpose of its visit. There are "chapters" of intense drama and excitement mixed with slow and purposeful exploration. The science in the book feels decent, and well researched, so helps pull you in.
The characters also feel real. They wonder if they should cheekily wave to camera's. They get excited sailing across an ocean. They wonder joking if women in space should be allowed, as their boobs distractingly bounce in zero G. One of the crew smuggles a piece of equipment on, and the book spends a whole chapter with the captain teasing it out of him and then we learn all about the crew member. Also when the 2nd in command gets a message and breaks protocol, and the series of wink-wink-nudge-nudge that happens as other people are subtly reminded that there's nothing to see here.
It's silly, but I felt often I wanted to know more about the characters. Why does the commander have 2 wife's, and how does Xmas look, for example. Did the guy ever win gold in the Lunar Olympics. I didn't expect that in a Sci-Fi book, honestly
I also enjoyed the squabbling scientists, including the revelation that the expedition only happens because the people voting have a vested interest ensuring that money isn't spent elsewhere possibly debunking their view of the Universe! You got to see the best and worst aspects of humanity in this, and as an extension of that I liked the way the Hermians weren't left as brutish people, they were humanised in a way, despite how they act.
This is a great read and I'm happy to recommend it. Book itself looks nice and reads easily, including type and layout and etc.
Più di tutto ho apprezzato l’originale, ma del tutto verosimile, messaggio sottostante a questa opera di Clarke: altre civiltà intelligenti potrebbero trovarci assai poco interessanti!
***Questa versione in lingua inglese (l’originale) è di facile lettura anche con una competenza linguistica media
I discovered this gem of a novel as an adult, an electrical engineer and scientist with a passion for space exploration. I loved each page within. Every aspect, even the most bizzarre and creative, appears wholly plausible from a scientific point of view
Most of all I enjoyed the original, but entirely credible, idea put forward by Arthur Clarke in this book: other intelligent civilisations might not find us earthlings particulary interesting!