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Rendezvous with Rama

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Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#71

Post by cal_dent »

ternus wrote: post #31

"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.

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

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#72

Post by readthenotes1 »

"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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#73

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

ternus wrote: post #31

"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.

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

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#75

Post by Apocryphon »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #42
pavlov wrote: post #22

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 i…

> 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.

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#76

Post by tehnub »

ternus wrote: post #34

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 pr…

Nah we're not doing prequel hate in 2026

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#77

Post by refulgentis »

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#78

Post by przemelek »

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" ;-)

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#79

Post by selcuka »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #72

"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.

> 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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#80

Post by hermitcrab »

stevenwoo wrote: post #23
Vermin2000 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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