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Rendezvous with Rama

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Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#81

Post by TomatoCo »

przemelek wrote: post #78

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" Ra…

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

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#82

Post by microflash »

cyphertruck wrote: post #13
abraxas wrote: post #5

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.

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

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#83

Post by atombender »

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.

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#84

Post by hermitcrab »

selcuka wrote: post #79
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.

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#85

Post by jacquesm »

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#86

Post by jacquesm »

ssteeper wrote: post #53

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 visualiz…

Indeed.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#87

Post by jacquesm »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #21
jayGlow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll admit I'm quite anxious for Children of Strife. Children of Time is an all-time favorite, but each subsequent book in the series was a bit of a disappointment. Fingers crossed this one turns the tide

Agreed, the first one is a masterpiece and every sequel feels like a step down. It's a real pity because we do need more good SF writers, there are already too few of them.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#88

Post by jacquesm »

shagie wrote: post #70
hombre_fatal wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Some of the ringworld covers were quite good.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#89

Post by jerf »

oniony wrote: post #12

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 h…

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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