Rendezvous with Rama
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Rendezvous with Rama
1–10 of 124 posts
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#2Some 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.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#3Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favorites as a teenager, hopefully the film adaptation does it justice.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#4If 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.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#5For 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.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#6If 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.
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.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#7For 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.
Children of Time was excellent, so thank for this recommendation.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#8I 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.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#9If 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.
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.
Re: Rendezvous with Rama
#10I 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.