I haven’t been great about keeping up with reading this year, bouncing between a number of different books and struggling to finish them. So I focused on something small and classic to see if that would give me a reading kick-start. I picked Rendezvous with Rama because I haven’t actually read it before even though I grew up in a household full of classic SF thanks to my parent’s taste in books, and also the stories about the comet Oumuamua were still in my head.
Rama is for the most part a hard SF novel set in the near-to-mid future. Mankind has colonised part of the solar system but no further, no intelligence has been found other than us, and there’s no technology that would be out of place at our current level (no faster-than-light travel). When a large object is detected that doesn’t behave like a comet a ship is directed to investigate and we follow the crew of that ship as they encounter the first non-terrestrial object and discover a complex and alien “world”. Rama is a ship, apparently devoid of life as we know it, and completely alien to our understanding. But the basis for the ship matches how we would build a generational ship (hollowed out so the inner surface is used, spin for gravity, lighting down the long axis) and this helps the team work to discover the secrets onboard.
As a hard SF novel it works. There’s a good exploration here of how an alien culture can have similarities to our own that we can use to start understanding them, and yet other things can be so alien (things coming in threes, weird symbiotic constructed creatures) that we struggle to grasp them. And it works as an illustration of a competent team exploring an environment and both coping with and ignoring as needed the political nonsense and paranoia happening around them. Where it’s flawed is that the human characters are pretty much cyphers and stereotypes, even the captain of the ship having two wives on different planets feels like an aside rather than something that’s built on. It suffers from some dated writing such as sexism about women with big breasts being distracting in low gravity (said woman randomly has sex with the captain at the end of the book just because that’s a thing they do…)
I had read some other Arthur C Clarke before so I was prepared for the style of writing, but I did still find it a bit dry and dated. It’s a decent and quick read for the solid science fiction in there but I wouldn’t rush to read it again.