Rendezvous with Rama

, #1

Hardcover, 303 pages

English language

Published Aug. 13, 1973 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

ISBN:
978-0-15-176835-6
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OCLC Number:
596321
ISFDB ID:
1319

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4 stars (31 reviews)

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 …

41 editions

helps to know the sequels are worse

2 stars

A promising opening of mysterious object and dry elder academic panel bickering.... oh don't let this be just a cool exploration of the physical properties of this space... in space... with bonus tangential misogyny... oh, the physical properties and some cold-war-commentary at least accelerate... pity for the futuristic anachronisms, 1973 feels closer to Jules Verne than to us.

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Subjects

  • Rama (Imaginary space vehicle) -- Fiction

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