Rama is a mysterious object. At first, astronomers think it is an asteroid. Later on, as it gets bigger in size on the telescopes, it appears as a rather strange shaped-body, and eventually they discover that it is artificial.
Cylindric, with the somewhat comical looks of a giant pressure cooker, scientists soon learn through the study of its parameters, that the body must be hollow. Soon it will be made clear that its an enormous technological device made by who knows who. An advanced alien civilization, supposedly.
As an artificial body, it is awesomely big. As a world, it is is a small one of some 20 miles of diameter and 50 miles long, but a world nonetheless. It can also be considered, of course, a giant alien spaceship. The Endeavour, at the time devoting itself to other tasks, is called to get closer to the thing and land on it to have a look. The spaceship led by commander Norton (a Captain Cook devotee), does as it is ordered, and lands near the center of one of the huge round cylinder faces, the northern one.
A few crew members make their way into the object, without much difficulty. At first it is all darkness. They walk along strange vast corridors. Finally they seem to reach the edge of an enormous open space.
They start to explore it, with some artificial light of their own, which allows them to have a glimpse of the hugeness of this hollow world. At some point a (sort of) dawn will come unexpectedly. Six (artificial) suns start to irradiate their rays, and it is morning within Rama. The incredible magnificence of this world´s interior shines up. And everything "natural" the explorers find there. Seas and valleys, and mountains and greenness. Even if the cylindrical interior creates some disturbing (and a bit scary) optical illusions and perspective distortions. Also some misterious servant-like creatures will discreetly show up in due time.
There is a problem when trying to explore this impressive artificial interior. Rama had entered the Solar System and reached the Earth outskirts. It is now heading towards the Sun, and in principle it will soon come out of the Solar System, and will vanish forever into the stars. So the time that the Endeavour astronauts have to pull out some secrets from the thing is limited: only a few weeks.
Rendez-vous with Rama deals with the topic of contact, so much a commonplace in SF. But Clarke offers us a new frame and approach, far more mature and "realistic" than the the usual in other works of the genre. Inside Rama, it is wonder and full strangeness you encounter, things you had never seen before. But to some degree it also appears familiar as well, with those lakes, mountains and so on. It is this combination of strangeness and familiarity that makes Rama so sinister. What is the purpose for all that, who built up this piece of technological arquitecture far bigger than anything created by man, so far or in the forseeable future? Could Rama be, for instance, a spaceship travelling across the universe, away from the original planet of its alien builders, has this become inhabitable? Is the ship itself a world of its own to hold generations of ramans for a long journey of centuries or millenia, into those stars that light takes ages to reach?
There is a connection with Stanislaw Lem here. In some of the Polish author´s novels such as Solaris, Fiasco or Invincible, communication with alien beings, or forms of life the product of a completely different evolutionary process, will most likely be impossible rather than hard. Not only a different culture and biology, but different mental processes and motivations, unimaginable communication codes and tools. More so if we consider how hard dialogue, transmission of info, between human beings themselves can be, and usually is.
Communication with other non-Earth beings is not (it comes without saying) considered one of the bigger things (as A. Burgess once called them) of the "human condition". One of the big human affairs that mainstream literature has usually dealt with over the centuries. At present, alien communication cannot be compared in literary terms to jealousy, ambition, love or death, or other used-up topics of the sort.
But that is so mainly because the Space Age, which started off with the Sputnik, is a mere 50-year old. Science and Technology are here to stay and their impact on human reality will only increase in the decades and centuries to come. And this "weird" topic of communication with other beings will (potentially) become dostoievskyan in no time.
One day, in a maybe distant future, there should be some kind of contact. It cannot be otherwise, unless we are alone in un unconceivably big universe, which is rather unlikely.
We will always be humanistic creatures, of course. Which means that issues like Art and Literature will always have their place in human civilization, no matter how technical this will become. And alien communication will have its corner among the humanistic-high brow, intelectuals and the like, not only among scientists. A big human affair, quoi, waiting for a new playwright of genius. And our theory is that works like Lem's Solaris or His masters voice, or Clarke's Rama (still rather looked down upon today ) will have an entirely different critical consideration. Old classics from a nearly forgotten time, that in which man started to leave (Tsiolkovsky dixit) the cradle-Earth.
Rendezvous with Rama 1973. Arthur C. Clarke
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