252 pages, Gollancz
Review
by Pat Black
I’m
as catholic in my writing as I am in my reading habits, but there’s something
especially frustrating about penning sci-fi.
It’s
not so much the research involved. Even the hardest sci-fi can involve a lot of
rule-bending - or bullshitting, to give it its technical term. No, it’s more to
do with the depressing notion that there’s very little I can invent in the
field that hasn’t already been thought up, by minds immeasurably superior to
our own.
Such
as hive minds. Then there’s sentient plants, benevolent aliens, nasty aliens,
utopia, dystopia, dinotopia, matter transmission, digital immortality, firing
lasers at god… even being visited by us,
from the future… it’s all been done, with diving bells on. Every time I
have a “eureka” moment with a sci-fi idea, it turns out I’ve invented the
wheel. It’s hard to think up something unknown to science fiction, never mind
science.
This
makes Arthur C Clarke’s career all the more impressive. Every time, whether
it’s his novels or short stories, he shocks us with something new, something
weird, something alien.
RendezvousWith Rama came relatively late in his career. It looks at the story of a
mission launched from Earth a couple of hundred years from now to intercept a
strange object which has entered our solar system from the gulfs of space – a
gigantic cylinder, of almost impossible dimensions.
Although
we’ve moved on to colonising the less obnoxious worlds in our own solar system
by this point, we haven’t yet discovered alien life, or any signs of it. This
makes the appearance of the object doubly exciting. It travels far faster than
anything else in existence, and it’s clearly been designed by non-human
intelligence.
The
spacecraft Endeavour blasts off to rendezvous with the cylinder as it appears
to head for orbit around our own sun. When the ship, under the command of the plucky
Captain Norton, not only docks with the cylinder but discovers that there’s a
handy airlock waiting for them to open up, he decides to boldly split
infinitives where no man has split infinitives before – penetrating the
interior of an alien spacecraft, seemingly dead for untold millennia.
The
hollow craft is almost a planet in its own right. The best way I can describe
it is if you drew some characteristics of land and sea on a piece of paper, and
then rolled it up, with the drawing on the inside and the long edges touching.
As the astronauts penetrate the interior of the craft, they are confronted by
cylindrical seas that curl around above them, cities arcing above where the sky
should be, Inception-style, false suns and staircases that plod on forever,
gradually working for and against the gravitational forces brought to bear by
the centrifugal movement of the spacecraft – which they christen, if that’s an
appropriate term, Rama.
This
is a novel of hard sci-fi and it’s fair to say that Arthur C Clarke was a man
who could do fractions in his head. All the physics, all the angles, all the
trajectories are worked out as the crew explore Rama before it reaches the sun.
Wonderful words like perihelion and umbra are invoked. But it’s never overly
complicated, and Clarke always favours a sense of wonder over the seemingly
impossible spacecraft separate from the equations and difficult concepts (well,
so far as I know, anyway… regrettably I didn’t take physics in third year).
Characterisation
is weak, par for the course for Arthur C Clarke I’m afraid. Aside from a bit of
romance between the captain and his foxy first officer (he even squeezes in a
‘boobs in zero-g’ joke), the crew are mainly dutiful drones, allowing the world
to unfurl around them. But there’s plenty of peril and danger to negotiate –
giant cliffs, great streaks of internal lightning, hurricanes, a nuclear bomb
sent by angry people from Mercury and a spiralling tidal wave all serve to
menace the characters.
And
there are aliens - odd, task-specific creatures which tend to the needs of the
mysterious Ramans - some of them dangerous.
I
liked the fact that the resolutions to every peril for the Endeavour’s crew
were all arrived at through good old problem solving, the appliance of science.
One section almost literally requires a leap of faith, with a character
trusting his life to the calculations of a colleague who works out speed, time
and gravitational pull before urging him to jump off a cliff. There are no ray
guns, explosions, double-crosses and fist-fights in this story, something of a relief
when it comes to sci-fi.
But
what’s it all about? Well, Raymond Chandler once spoke of the ideal mystery
being one which has no resolution. If that idea doesn’t appeal, Rendezvous With
Rama might not be the meeting for you. Clarke was always more enamoured with
the wonder and mystery of what might lurking out there in deep space than
finding any definite answers – a bit like real life cosmic predictions and
theories. Chandler’s got a point; that’s why we keep coming back to it, keep
theorising, keep stretching out towards the stars.
Given
the fact that we went from hansom cabs to the moon in the space of 70 years,
it’s fair to say we’ve done well when it comes to exploring space. But there’s
so much more to discover. Let’s… keep… reaching…
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