Rendezvous with Rama
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| Rendezvous with Rama | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Novel by Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| Released | 1972 | |
| Original publisher (U.S.) | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | |
| Genre | Science fiction | |
| Professional reviews | ||
| SF Reviews.Net | T. M. Wagner | [link] |
| Awards | ||
| Hugo Award | Best Novel | 1974 |
| Nebula Award | Best Novel | 1973 |
| Jupiter Award | Best Novel | 1974 |
The novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards upon its release, and is widely regarded as one of the cornerstones in Clarke's bibliography. It is considered a science fiction classic, and is particularly seen as a key hard science fiction text.
A movie based on this novel, starring Morgan Freeman and slated to be directed by David Fincher, was in development for Freeman's company Revelations Entertainment, but was later abandoned.
Synopsis
The "Rama" of the title is the starship, which is initially mistaken for an asteroid and named after the Hindu deity Rama. (By the 22nd century, we are told, scientists have run out of Greek and Roman mythological figures to name astronomical bodies after.) The nature and purpose of the starship and its creators remains enigmatic.The book was meant to be a stand-alone, but the final sentence of the book convinced almost everyone who read it that there would be at least two more sequels:
- And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had woken from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.
Books in the series
- Rendezvous with Rama (1972) ISBN 978-0-553-28789-9
- Rama II (1989) ISBN 978-0-553-28658-8
- The Garden of Rama (1991) ISBN 978-0-553-29817-8
- Rama Revealed (1993) ISBN 978-0-553-56947-6
Design and geography of Rama
- See main article: Rama
Rama is, in design, similar to an O'Neill habitat, with a large cylindrical interior that rotates to provide approximately one gee of artificial gravity. Unlike most O'Neill habitat designs, however, Rama is equipped with several space drives, giving it maneuvering capability.
Rama contains a body of water, the Cylindrical Sea, which wraps around the cylindrical interior "surface" of Rama about halfway between the ends. In the center of the Cylindrical Sea is an island of mysterious purpose, named New York by the astronauts due to its tall towers. The Sea divides Rama into Northern and Southern Hemicylinders; beyond these are the North and South Poles, which are circular walls capping the interior space. The North Pole contains Rama's airlocks; the South Pole contains its drive systems.
Other collections of "buildings" are found on the "surface", arbitrarily named Rome, Peking, Paris, Moscow, London, and Tokyo.
Effects on science and history
The initial search program that detects Rama in the first two chapters of the book, Project Spaceguard, is a program to detect near-Earth objects on Earth-impact trajectories, initiated after a fictional disastrous asteroid strikes Italy on September 11, 2077, destroying Padua and Verona, and sinking Venice. A real Spaceguard project, named after the project in Rendezvous, was initiated some years later. After interest in the dangers of asteroid strikes was heightened by a series of Hollywood disaster films, the United States Congress gave NASA authorization and funding to support Spaceguard.
Other media
A text adventure style computer game based on the book was made in 1984 by Telarium and exported to systems such as the Apple II and Commodore 64. Despite its primitive graphics, it had highly detailed descriptions, and it followed the book very closely along with having puzzles to solve during the game. It was adapted from the Clarke novel in 1983 by Ron Martinez, who went on to design the massively multiplayer online game 10Six, also known as Project Visitor.Sierra Entertainment created RAMA in 1996 as a point and click adventure game in the style of Myst. Along with highly detailed graphics, Arthur C. Clarke also appeared in the game as the guide for the player. This game also featured characters from the sequel book Rama II.
Early in the millennium, actor Morgan Freeman expressed his desire to produce a film based on Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama. The film was to be produced by Freeman's production company, Revelations Entertainment.[link] Freeman has not given up on the project, but he states that funding for a movie of this type is hard to procure. A popular science-fiction web site (Sci Fi Wire) posted an interview with Freeman about his troubles with the production. [link]
External links
| The Novels of Arthur C. Clarke |
| Prelude to Space | The Sands of Mars | Islands in the Sky | Against the Fall of Night | Childhood's End | Earthlight | The City and the Stars | The Deep Range | A Fall of Moondust | Dolphin Island | Glide Path | ' | The Lion of Comarre & Against the Fall of Night | Rendezvous with Rama | Imperial Earth | The Fountains of Paradise | ' | Songs of Distant Earth | ' | Cradle | Rama II | The Ghost from the Grand Banks | The Garden of Rama | Rama Revealed | The Hammer of God | Richter 10 | ' | The Trigger | The Light of Other Days | Time's Eye | Sunstorm | The Last Theorem |
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