Book 1, Rendezvous with Rama (School & Library Binding)

An unknown object has entered Earth's solar system in the year 2130, and a rocket ship is dispatched to study this alien artifact (dubbed Rama) and report back on its findings. That sentence is a summary of almost the entire plot. But RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA is not a story that is wholly concerned with plot. It's more a series of set pieces: the decision to explore, the examination of the immediate inside, the voyage across the interior's sea, etc. Each one is interesting on its own, but not all of them contribute much to the overall story.

The purpose these set pieces serve is to invoke a sense of wonder at this unknowable alien object. I'm reminded of Jules Verne's voyage-type stories, where his protagonist(s) would become engaged in a multitude of individual adventures. But instead of exploring (and inventing) Earth's wonders, Clarke is showing us a completely fictional environment. It's quite fun. Clarke put most of his effort into creating this landscape, and it becomes the focus and centerpiece of the whole novel. This entire endeavor would flop completely if Clarke had been unable to sustain the suspense for the full length of the novel. But he does it.

Character development is not one of this book's priorities. Too much time is spent developing the setting to provide us with people of any great depth. Clarke gets away with it here (while other science fiction novels have crashed and burned on this point) because he has set the book up as a mystery, with the setting as its question. Squandering time on the human characters would merely be a distraction, when all the reader is really interested in is Rama itself.

RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA is now over thirty years old, but this science fiction novel isn't showing its age (although some of the aside mentions of polygamous relationships are attempting to sound modern and forward-thinking, yet instead end up seeming rather quaint). I've heard mixed things about the sequels which follow on from the end of this book. Given how much I enjoyed the first in the series, I think I'll probably at least try one or two of them. Maybe I won't like them as much as I did RENDEZVOUS, but that's a high standard to reach.