Rendezvous with Rama

https://blog.engora.com/2026/03/rendezvous-with-rama.html

by Vermin2000 • 5 months ago

104 120 5 months ago

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Vermin2000• 5 months ago

Some thoughts on the novel: its strengths and weaknesses, why it's so different from other first contact novels. I'd love to hear people's views of the novel.

stevenwoo• 5 months ago

Like the other poster wrote, interesting mystery/plot, poor characterization shared with all of his work I have read - one thing that sticks out was the overly long bit about the man’s fascination with his female partner’s breasts in zero gravity could be taken as weird.

hermitcrab2• 5 months ago

Clarke was widely believed to be gay/bisexual when it was illegal in the UK. Perhaps he was overcompensating?

wsowens• 5 months ago

Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favorites as a teenager, hopefully the film adaptation does it justice.

ggm-at-algebras3• 5 months ago

If he'd stopped after one, it would have been fine. He decided to do a series. It got weird. I still read them but the original is a decent standalone and you won't die unhappy if you never read the following.

The same could be said of 2001.

XorNot• 5 months ago

I thought 3001 was fine and a good conclusion.

Although it seemed implausible in the setting that humanity wasn't immortal given some of the technology.

zem2• 5 months ago

I remember 3001 mainly for the bit about deism vs theism, which is one of my favourite throwaway passages in all of sf.

8<-------------------

"You said that all the old religions have been discredited. So what do people believe nowadays?"

"As little as possible. We’re all either Deists or Theists."

"You’ve lost me. Definitions, please."

"They were slightly different in your time, but here are the latest versions. Theists believe there’s not more than one God; Deists that there is not less than one God."

"I’m afraid the distinction’s too subtle for me."

"Not for everyone; you’d be amazed at the bitter controversies it’s aroused. Five centuries ago, someone used what’s known as surreal mathematics to prove there’s an infinite number of grades between Theists and Deists. Of course, like most dabblers with infinity, he went insane."

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

I feel the stories got successively smaller from 2010 and on. 2010's epilogue hints at the developments after 20,000 years, and 2061 and 3001 feel small in comparison.

2010 is a good follow on to the 2001 book, and answers some of the questions the first book left while expanding the mysteries and the sense of wonder.

My wife and I still quote it when answering questions such as what's for dinner.

"Something wonderful".

Analemma_• 5 months ago

Officially, all the Rama sequels were co-authored by Clarke and Gentry Lee. Clarke claimed that Lee did virtually all the writing and he was only a consultant, although AFAICT the only source for this claim was in an interview many years after they were published, presumably after Clarke was aware of their negative reception, so who knows how much of that is true vs. reputation management.

But yeah, they're awful. I read them when I was 12-13 and it was one of my first introductions to the idea that sequels to great books could be so bad (and then for some reason I went on to read the Brian Herbert Dune prequels, which are even worse). Read the first one, and pretend it stopped there.

ggm-at-algebras3• 5 months ago

It would seem passing strange that Gentry Lee came up with all the awful bits and the consulting oversight didn't.

metaphor• 5 months ago

In my mind, the prose of the sequels were so unlike Clarke when I read them as a teen that it created a long stint of aversion towards spending time on anything with co-authors. I owe Rendezvous a lot though; had I not discovered that book as a kid, there's little chance I'd be reading recreationally today.

rendleflag• 5 months ago

The sequel series was one of my favorite sets of books. It’s markedly different from Rendezvous, but I found them an enjoyable read. It was contrived at points, but the series had my favorite ending for a character.

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

2010 is also good. The movie is also competent, but it could never fill the shoes 2001 left.

twoodfin• 5 months ago

I am a big fan of both films, and have over many years come to the firm conclusion that, while 2010: The Year We Make Contact could never live up to its best-films-of-all-time predecessor, it’s both a terrific film on its own merits and could be tweaked even today to be better.

What it needs, fundamentally, is the Blade Runner treatment: Kill the expository voiceover, tighten up the edit, make the ending less sentimental and more mysterious.

abraxas2• 5 months ago

For those who already read Rendezvous with Rama but need their alien aliens fix I can highly recommend "Shroud" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is a similar theme with modern writing and convincing aliens as is pretty much expected by now from Tchaikovsky.

gbourne• 5 months ago

Children of Time was excellent, so thank for this recommendation.

jayGlow• 5 months ago

the fourth book in that series comes out later this week if you haven't been keeping up with him

oniony2• 5 months ago

I enjoyed Children of Time and also A Fire Upon the Deep, if you're looking for more recommendations.

cyphertruck2• 5 months ago

I just read a series of his books involving "unspace" so nice to see a recommendation. Will check out Shroud.

microflash• 5 months ago

Yes, The Architects books were pretty great but they had very classic soap opera kind of vibe than hardcore science fiction. I did enjoy them nonetheless.

Pepe1vo2• 5 months ago

I liked shroud a lot, but the ending felt very ungratifying. It's like Tchaikovsky wrote himself into a corner and didn't really know how to wrap it up nicely. I find this to be true of some of his other books as well.

abraxas2• 5 months ago

To each their own. I did not expect the ending and found it quite satisfying.

UltraSane• 5 months ago

Tchaikovsky has written some of the best books I have ever read like Children of Time and Children of Ruin and also some of the worst books I have ever read like Cage of Souls.

arionmiles• 5 months ago

I decided to get back into reading two years ago and I picked this as one of the first ones to get started with, given it was a small book. I absolutely love Arthur C. Clarke's style of helping you visualize the grand scenes.

His books are more plot driven and the characters are pretty flat, but it's so damn fun to read through!

Morgan Freeman has been trying to get the movie adaptation made since early 2000s and wants to play Commander Norton. I had read that Denis Villenueve (the same director from the new Dune movies) was attached to direct the adaptation, but it seems like his schedule is really busy. He recently finished filming Dune Messiah and then he's got the next James Bond movie to deliver.

hombre_fatal• 5 months ago

I read it as a young teen, and I remember trying to imagine what it might look like to enter a cylinder that large.

I remember having fun doing it, which might not be something I could amuse myself with 20 years later since it's hard to hold on to that kind of childlike wonder unless you're on a hallucinogen.

shagie3• 5 months ago

Some of my early renderings Renderman (high school), Povray (college), and Art ( https://www.abemegahed.com/software/ - at the very end) were trying to visualize the scale of Rama and Ringworld.

The scale of it was... well... astronomical.

jacquesm5• 4 months ago

Some of the ringworld covers were quite good.

cyphertruck2• 5 months ago

Been following this movie's development for over 20 years. I give props to Morgan Freeman for trying so hard all this time to get it made. Denis Villeneuve would be a great director for this, and he could make it work.

Let's hope it happens soon... finally.

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

The biggest danger in giving Rama to Villeneuve is the studios deciding to make the sequels as well.

oniony2• 5 months ago

I really enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama when I read it as a sixteen year old. The sense of awe, the scale, the mystery: it was great. But nothing much happened and the story didn't really go anywhere interesting.

I eagerly read the sequel, hoping it would unveil the mysteries, but it felt like it was not written by Clarke at all (I suspect Lee wrote it all). Instead of wonder, sci-fi and reveal, it was more about the human relationships of the astronauts and less about the sci-fi.

jeltz• 5 months ago

I too got bored, as you said the book did not seem to go anywhere.

brcmthrowaway• 5 months ago

Same with Stranger in a Strange Land

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

I too got bored, as you said the book did not seem to go anywhere.

I tried to rationalise those humans were from a world very different from my own, but not even that worked. It was like watching a reality show with uninteresting people.

garciasn• 5 months ago

It was a great story, right up until the lack of an ending. As someone who reads lots of books, I will NEVER understand authors who don’t wrap up a story.

It’s like someone telling you a story and you ask, “and then what happened,” and they reply, “nothing; that’s the end of the story.” No one appreciates that, but people rave about authors who leave “open-ended interpretations!”

jerf• 4 months ago

From a 2026 perspective I couldn't possibly have had as a teenager in the 1990s, it kind of feels like a well-polished, extended SCP story.

As I can in 2026 gorge myself on "mysterious things doing mysterious tasks mysteriously", now an entire sub-genre of its own, I'm pretty sure the impact if I read it for the first time today would be somewhat muted by comparison.

I am also reminded of the J. J. Abrams "mystery box storytelling" technique. Rendevous with Rama was perhaps one of my first encounters with the technique, so I have fond memories of it. But in 2026 I find myself tired of the "woo woo there's a mystery and we're not going to tell you what it is" because in the end, all mystery boxes are fundamentally the same, and I've seen enough of the mystery box. It has its place in history but if a random person who has never read sci-fi of this era wanted a recommendation to start with, this would be way, way down on my list, unless you explicitly want to read things significant to the genre.

But as I've tried to make clear by my repeated references to the present time, that's my 2026 review. For the time it was a fine book.

pavlov2• 5 months ago

I always thought that, out of the Clarke novels, “Songs of Distant Earth” would make a good movie adaptation.

Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)

For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts, Lem’s “Solaris” still holds its own, and the Tarkovsky movie is its own standalone classic (again something very different from the book).

poisonarena• 5 months ago

back in 1994, when I was 9 years old, one of my favorite albums that got me into electronic music as a young boy was the concept album "Songs of Distant Earth" by Mike Oldfield.. Also the remixes by Jam&Spoon.. I think he released some kind of weird software about it too.. I think its time to finally read the book.

https://youtu.be/gRivMEEZZE8?si=S1ZCDAg9Sl37jwoX full album

zem2• 5 months ago

"a fall of moondust" would translate extremely well to screen, and "the martian" has shown that it's the kind of movie that would do well enough in terms of reception.

teamonkey• 5 months ago

The first Clarke I read as a kid and still one of my favourites. It hasn’t aged well, not least because it was written before we landed on the moon and now know its surface isn’t like that.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 months ago

I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.

I do, too, but I had to accept that the books basically gave us names; and that's about it.

The books would have been a complete snooze-fest, if they had been accurately rendered.

Apocryphon• 5 months ago

Foundation as a series is already somewhat uneven and less than “pure.” Asimov pulled a Lucas and cluttered it with sequels and prequels that muddled it with connections to his robot novels. Then there’s the additional books by other writers. And if you want to get real picky, Second Foundation gets real pseudoscientific with the pseudo-psionics compared to the first two books.

dexwiz• 5 months ago

I'd all the Southern Reach trilogy (quadrilogy? now) to this list. It's more on the cosmic/eldritch side, but similar sense of unknowable.

SPOILER WARNING

My interruption is that Area X/The Crawler is a probe built to study and build a bridge back to its creator. Area X is expanding because it's the inside of a wormhole. But whatever is on the other side is long dead, and the probe is acting on instinct.

dbspin• 5 months ago

Counterpoint, I very much enjoyed the sequels (all but the last). They added three dimensional characters, especially women and explored a variety of aspects of first contact. They're a believable examination of how humans recreate the same social ills over and over, given the opportunity for utopia.

ufmace• 4 months ago

I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.

Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.

nradov• 5 months ago

The latest episode of Rick Rubin's Tetragrammaton podcast has an interview with Eric Roth who adapted the screenplay for Rendezvous with Rama.

https://www.tetragrammaton.com/content/eric-roth

the_biot• 5 months ago

As much as I love "Songs of Distant Earth", I suspect a Hollywood version of it would amount to "giant lobsters vs space marines", whereas in the book they're a minor sideshow.

cal_dent3• 5 months ago

I tend to agree. I've always thought it would work well as a TV show in the more heady days of streaming (let's say 2012 - 2020) when networks and studios where it still felt like they had some room to take more risk. It's more towards the end of the last TV "golden age" but an adaptation like something like Apple's take on "Tales from the Loop". Not brash or loud or too formulaic but somehow still got made

pndy4• 4 months ago

So basically Avatar just without all the Smurfs huh?

It would be surely minced thru to fit all the standard of the industry - and that's the fear I'm having while craving for screen adaptations of books today.

shiroiuma2• 4 months ago

as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Others have noted that a faithful adaptation would have been a snooze-fest and inconsistent at best. There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.

Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it

It's being helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the guy who did Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and the new Dune movies. If anyone can do a good job with it, he can.

For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts,

Don't forget Villeneuve's "Arrival".

MBCook3• 4 months ago

There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.

Yeah. The idea of the genetic dynasty with brothers Dawn/Day/Dusk, as well as how Demerzel fits in has been pretty great, and none of that was in the novels.

throw0101c• 4 months ago

Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation.

Denis Villeneuve (Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, Prisoners, etc) is set to direct and is writing the script as well:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#Film

Though it may be a little while since he first has to release adaptation of Dune Messiah, and a Bond film is probably next:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve#Upcoming_proj...

theragra• 4 months ago

Lem is underappreciated. I've recently reread a book with his interviews Tako rzecze... Lem (in Russian, English version does not exist). This caused me to remember some of his works.

While he is a bit snobby and complaints too much, you can't deny he really envisioned huge amount of things to come. His imagination is next to none, and probably some things he described we will see only in the distant future, or maybe during the singularity, if it happens.

yaman12• 5 months ago

Making it a movie would ruin it. Unless it was more of a “Literary” film like 2001 and even then a fancy director would have to stray from the original to make it work visually and add conflict. Just read it. I believe in Rama’s premise. Aliens just wouldn’t be interested in us in the same way we’re not interested in local squirrel population. Rama answers the “great filter” question. Where is all the intelligent life going in universe? Right under our noses doing its thing while we do ours. Maybe on our AI will be interesting to aliens.

ternus5• 5 months ago

"Wonder" might be the wrong way to describe it, but Blindsight by Peter Watts gave me the same feeling of "this is incredibly alien and I have no idea what will happen next".

Other books with a similar plot structure and deeply alien vibe:

- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (recommended elsewhere in this thread)

- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

I know there's one I'm forgetting.

kryptn2• 5 months ago

While reading Pushing Ice a very common thought I had was "did Reynolds want to do a Rama sequels?"

Shroud is great, easy recommendation. Another of Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay, also great, also very alien.

dmbche• 5 months ago

For Peter Watts - Echopraxia is just as wonderful as Blindsight, highly recommend.

cal_dent3• 5 months ago

the comment on the blog recommending "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is also an excellent shout. One of the more original titles I've read in recent years that gives that feeling

SAI_Peregrinus• 5 months ago

Stanisław Lem's Solaris belongs in such a list IMO.

atombender• 4 months ago

Blindsight (and the excellent sequel, Echopraxia) is indeed great.

Solaris by Lem is perhaps the one above all. Lem wrote several of these "inscrutable alien first contact" novels: His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasco, and Eden are basically all variations on this theme, each one unique and highlighting a different aspect of humans' inability to understand the universe. The last three are a little dated now, but still enjoyable to read. HMV is rather dry, a Borgesian essay on an investigation into an alien signal, with lots of references to fictional scientific papers. (Len also wrote two collections of very Borgesian essays that are basically reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. They're interesting and funny, but I wouldn't put them among his most entertaining work.)

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also a masterpiece. They also have a few stories about unseen aliens manipulating the history of humanity by placing traps or transforming humans into infiltrators. The Max Kammerer books (e.g. Beetle in the Anthill) involve this storyline and are very good, probably not well known today.

I tried Tchaikovsky (both Children of Time and Shroud) and found him to be completely unengaging as a writer. Just really dull writing and flat characters. Watts and Reynolds are much better writers. Watts in particular can really pack a punch.

macartain2• 4 months ago

For genuine, believable oddness - although the SF pigeonhole seems restrictive - I would recommend the utterly unique M. John Harrison, specifically the later Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. The much earlier Centauri Device pops up on lots of lists but although it is entertaining and original, is not in the same league. Definitely more in common with the Strugatsky brothers than Clarke - humans fixated on commerce and sex, much more than technology.. quantuum weirdness bleeding into the occult... a galaxy-wide, neon-lit rust-belt. If there is anyone else doing anything remotely like him then I am all ears - sadly, I have read it all! I also felt that Tchaikovsky's ideas are striking and well thought-out, but I did not encounter any people in his books. Peter Watt definitely interesting but often unnecessarily hard to parse, I thought? Must revisit Reynolds - only tried one many years ago...

ternus5• 5 months ago

DO NOT READ THE SEQUELS

One of the few cases where they actively ruin the first book, to the extent you take them as true sequels. Clarke basically licensed his name and plot to Gentry Lee, who proceeded to ruin the sense of wonder by explaining everything, often in deeply unsatisfactory ways. They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

Star Wars prequel/sequel situation.

amiga-workbench• 5 months ago

I'm glad someone else said this because I was right about to. One of the things I love about Rama 1 is how it squashes the idea of a human centric universe where everything has to occur for reasons knowable by us. Rama is truly alien, inscrutable and fulfilling a purpose we don't get to understand. As soon as it enters our solar system, its gone for good, leaving a lot unanswered.

arjie2• 5 months ago

The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something.

pavlov2• 5 months ago

“the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something”

Sounds like Tolstoy…

shiroiuma2• 4 months ago

Are you talking about the same Rama sequels by Gentry Lee?

I admit it's been a long time since I read them (maybe 20 years), but I certainly don't remember anything quite like this. I remember it more like the other poster here said: they basically said everyone was corrupt. In a nutshell, Rama comes back to Earth with instructions that a bunch of humans need to come aboard to live out their lives there. But instead of sending their best, some parts of Earth send their worst: criminals and such. So pretty quickly there's several different "cities", with one of them basically run by some crime boss. One of the main characters' daughters gets involved with the crime boss somehow and murders him before killing herself, as payback for killing her father. Later, the human habitat goes to war with the aliens in one of the other habitats, because the humans had broken through to their side and invaded them for some reason I forget. There was even one plot point that the father had hacked into the ship's environmental controls because the humans insisted on having wood-burning fireplaces, even though this messed with the environmental control systems. Instead of just not burning fires, the basically forced him to change the system to accommodate their fireplaces.

But I don't remember any sex slaves. Maybe I forgot that part.

kryptn2• 5 months ago

I enjoyed the sequels but they're a completely separate story to me, and I don't think I'd read them again.

I didn't go in with the expectation that they'd be just like Rendezvous with Rama.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

As someone who was saved from reading the sequels due to online warnings, it's good to see that the next generation is being warned off of them also.

ternus5• 4 months ago

They have something like 2 stars on Goodreads. Imagine that as a fairly accurate product review score - if they were Amazon products, they'd be somewhere between "obviously counterfeit" and "burned my house down."

qubidt• 5 months ago

They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain

tehnub• 5 months ago

Nah we're not doing prequel hate in 2026

CamouflagedKiwi• 4 months ago

It's been a long time now, but from what I remember, you're not wrong. It's often a mistake to try to explain too much in sequels, which they certainly do.

Also they seemed to have a weird obsession about who was going to have sex with who to minimise inbreeding in the next generation. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by not remembering so well, but I recall that seeming pretty weirdly prominent.

m4rtink• 4 months ago

Yeah, the sequels really were very different and in hindsight not very good. Not to mention kinda too forcefully trying to show how almost everyone is a a corrupt asshole - both humans and large ass well as those almightly aliens sending the Rama craft so they can basically keep samples of sentient population as pets. :P

Yeah, really the original Rama book was it - just image how sequels to the Matrix movie would look like, those could have been even worse!

sbinnee• 4 months ago

Lucky for me I didn't read the sequels. I had my own theories about the purpose of Rama. Some theories are best left as theories in your heads to fuel ideas and imagination.

MBCook3• 4 months ago

I didn’t even know they existed until this article mentioned them.

I felt similar about the recent authorized sequel to Andromeda Strain.

It didn’t feel like the same universe to me. More like someone was told the book flap description of the first book and a few character names and just wrote from there.

ternus5• 4 months ago

There's a sequel to Andromeda Strain? ... Yeah, better off forgetting this information.

rhyperior• 4 months ago

TBH I’m not sure I’ve read anything from Gentry Lee that I really loved.

m463• 4 months ago

It's kind of strange to me that the classic scifi books I read in my youth had few if any follow-ons, and in this case had to resort to other writers to happen.

Meanwhile, many books I read nowadays on kindle routinely have 8 books in a series.

I wonder what makes this happen? Is it that self-publishing that just spits things out with less friction? Less editing and/or second guessing? AI helping? Expectations?

ASalazarMX• 4 months ago

Or do read them, but expect something different than the first book. Gentry Lee has a wilder imagination that Clarke, and once you realize it isn't Clarke, it's enjoyable in its own way.

WA• 5 months ago

Another recommendation, not a first contact story, but a very weird world and you wonder why things are how they are:

Inverted World by Christopher Priest

chuckledog• 5 months ago

Anyone play the Apple II video game by Telerium? Slow, but it did evoke that sense of wonder https://youtu.be/ITxhoiXiXRY?si=n21imKGMjqyjmQld

acheron• 5 months ago

Re: 2001

Clarke wrote the movie screenplay with Kubrick

I don’t think this is true? I thought the two of them sat together and worked out the plot, and then Kubrick went off and wrote the screenplay and Clarke went off and wrote the novel. So neither is really “based on” the other.

Anyway though, Rama is great, yes. I’m skeptical of the idea of a movie adaptation but Denis Villeneuve is probably the right one to try to pull it off.

iainmerrick• 5 months ago

Clarke’s book The Lost Worlds of 2001 goes into a lot of detail about the process (and is a great read in its own right). His take was that the book should say “a novel by Arthur C Clarke, based on the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick” and the movie should say “screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Arthur C Clarke”.

I think Kubrick was very much the dominant force in the partnership, but they did work quite closely together.

pndy4• 4 months ago

IIRC they were working together at the same time. The "2001" book set action around Saturn's Iapetus moon and so the screen initially was meant to follow it. But since it was impossible to create convincing planetary rings at that time, action switches to Jupiter's Europa. And so all other Odyssey books were set there as well.

ssteeper• 5 months ago

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the use of AI to generate accompanying imagery, but in this case I think it detracts significantly from the article. The interior of Rama is misrepresented: the scale is completely off and the geometry is nonsensical. The clustered "cities" London, Paris, and Rome are not represented correctly. Too many more issues to name. Disappointing.

One should cherish one's own internal visualizations formed from reading the text; one should be cautious in viewing other artists' conceptions of the same material, lest your own model of the book's setting be tainted by unfaithful representations. When the imagery is this bad, it's a disservice to the book's legacy.

jacquesm5• 4 months ago

Indeed.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 5 months ago

This reminded me that they made a point-and-click game of Rama. I remember enjoying it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game)

mattschaller• 5 months ago

I remember hearing that Morgan Freeman was going to star in the Rendezvous with Rama movie. I also remember hearing once that they were making a 2061 and 3001 movie. Not quite sure which series I enjoyed more.

readthenotes1• 5 months ago

"Clarke himself was gay"

Maybe it no longer needs to be said in this day and age, but Clarke was accused, credibly, of being a pedophile (or, to diminish it with a technicality, hebephile).

It is not quite as abhorrent/chilling as the also credible accusations against Marion Zimmer Bradley--but only because she was teamed up with a Jeffrey Epstein like character.

selcuka• 5 months ago

Clarke was accused, credibly, of being a pedophile

Genuinely curious, where does the credibility come from? As far as I can remember it turned out to be an outright slander by a tabloid paper.

hermitcrab2• 4 months ago

It is covered a bit here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/sep/12/sciencefiction...

No idea if he was as much of an insufferable egomaniac as that article makes out.

Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing. Hopefully we are a bit more enlightened now.

refulgentis• 5 months ago

Really cool writeup, really appreciated it -

Only thing that my hangry self took issue with -

"When I first read this as a teenager, I came away with a huge sense of wonder... When I re-read it many years later as an adult, I didn’t quite get that same sense of wonder, but maybe that’s because I’m more jaded now.

Wonder seems to have fallen out of favor with sci-fi writers."

Has it? Approaching it de novo, it sounds much more likely that you are immune to wonder - i.e. apply Occam's Razor to: A) I don't get wonder from this book that used to give me wonder B) I don't get wonder from recent SciFi books.

Then there's the second thing, ignoring Occam's Razor: "Recent SciFi books don't have wonder" doesn't follow from A and/or B, it's another premise that could justify B.

FWIW I feel the same way re: wonder getting older. My excuse is we've just seen too much training data, i.e. some things don't have an explanation and that's fine and there's nowhere to go with it.

przemelek• 5 months ago

To be honest I had always a lot of thoughts about this how Rama would be filled with air.... I mean it spins, but how Ramas filled it with air? Central Sea was one of sources, but water wasn't possible there before whole Rama being filled with air. So my thinking was always, air enters in the center, goes in all directions, hits surface which is 750 km/h... so ~40% of speed of molecules... how much it "slows down" Rama? Would there be needed some additional force to spin it? How long it would take to "calm down", and build gradient of oxygen/air in Rama...

Always was thinking about writting some simulation for it, but it was always "someday" ;-)

TomatoCo• 5 months ago

Conservation of angular momentum. Once everything is in it, and it's spun up, it won't stop.

pndy4• 4 months ago

Just assume that Ramans were "złote rączki" and everything simply clicks together. I mean, if they were capable to build such ships in the first place, it wouldn't be (and wasn't) a problem to fill these with capable environmental control systems and suitable drive.

In the other books characters are put into hibernation so they could travel at high speeds. Perhaps atmosphere was removed and only minimal breathing mixture was provided for the passengers.

By the way, I think SciFun had an episode on this channel about O'Neill cylinder

jacquesm5• 4 months ago

Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most evocative books I've read by Clarke. I often think back of it in visuals and then have to remind myself I read a book, I have not seen a movie.

This does not improve.

asmodeuslucifer• 4 months ago

Like celebrity deaths, news about RwR comes in threes.

whatisthiseven• 4 months ago

If you want to listen to the audiobook Rendevous with Rama, I strongly recommend against the version as narrated by Peter Ganim. One of the worst narrators. His pacing is so bad it sounds like he is inserting periods into the middle of sentences. By the end his cadence improves, but it seriously made me stop listening to the story multiple times because of the poor narration.

Which is a shame, because the story is great. The "aha"! moment the ending gives is a huge rush.

marsten• 4 months ago

What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish.

There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more realistic possibility is that AI is a fundamentally different type of intelligence that may never be fully human-like.

sumedh• 4 months ago

If any filmmaker is reading instead of waiting for the film to be made, maybe you should do it with the help of AI.

LargoLasskhyfv• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eon_(novel) is better, because bigger on the inside!1!!

Rendezvous with Rama

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