“And so 31/439 was christened Rama”. A genre classic which begins almost off-hand with Clarke’s famous “Spaceguard” suggestion for a system to protect against catastrophic asteroid collisions, a programme that a cursory view of the YouTube footage of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite will demonstrate is kinda worth considering. Less celebrated is Clarke’s inclusion of super-intelligent chimps on board the Endeavour doing all the menial work which is…interesting. No matter. “Rendezvous With Rama” is a fantastic thought experiment, a credible scientific intellect taking you through a finely extrapolated “what if?” scenario with a versimilitude and a matter-of-fact-ness that renders the concept very believable. Humanity (or at least the scientific community) is depicted as several centuries behind Rama in science and technology and mystified by the celestial visitor the way cavemen would be mystified by an iPhone. We encounter “biots”, some crazy meteorology, space drives, some solar system politics complicating matters and a finale of operatic astrophysics from the man who went on to turn Jupiter into a second sun. A small little character piece this ain’t, it’s an intellectual feast, which might explain why Hollywood has had problems getting the script for it right. Viewers of “Interstellar” might spot various visual references to Rama though, particularly the interior of the space station at the end. Clarke was such a visionary he also pre-empted Hollywoods current re-imagining craze by revisiting (or at least co-writing) Rama in a series of sequels about which I have zero knowledge but are next on my reading list. Fingers crossed the mysterious and aloof Rama survives sequelitis as well as it survived its passage here across our little solar system…
