Rendezvous with Rama

In his best novel since the classic Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke has made something quite new and wholly engrossing out of a familiar, eternally irresistible theme, mankind's first encounter with a visitant from unimaginably remote deeps of space and time.

The new celestial body that appears in the outer reaches of our solar system in 2130, believed at first to be an asteroid, and named Rama bu earthlings, soon proves not to be a natural object. It is a vast cylinder—about thirty-one miles long and twelve and a half across, with a mass of at least ten trillion tons—that is moving steadily closer to the Sun. The five-thousand-ton spaceship Endeavor lands on Rama, and when Commander Bill Norton and his crew make their way into its hollow interior they find a whole self-contained world—a world that has been cruising through space for at least 200,000 years and perhaps for more than a million. They have, at most, three weeks to explore Rama: a dead world, as it seems at first, though not without its perils, and with intensifying perils when it proves to be, in its own astonishing way, very much alive. Yet in the end it is Homo sapiens who poses the greatest menace, and whose exploits bring a continuously absorbing narrative to its highest pitch of excitement.

Solidly based in science made lucid for the layman, audaciously imaginative, at once visionary and subtly ironical in its final impact, Rendezvous with Rama is Arthur c. Clarke at the dazzling top of his form.