Rendezvous with Rama

After an asteroid falls in Northeast Italy on 11 September 2077, creating a major disaster, the government of Earth sets up the Spaceguard system as an early warning of arrivals from deep space.

The "Rama" of the title is an alien starship weighing at least ten trillion tons, initially mistaken for an asteroid categorised as "31/439". It is detected by astronomers in the year 2131 while it is still outside the orbit of Jupiter. Its speed (100,000 km/h – 62,150 m/h) and the angle of its trajectory clearly indicate it is not on a long orbit around the Sun, but is an interstellar object. The astronomers' interest is further piqued when they realise the asteroid has an extremely rapid rotation period of four minutes and is exceptionally large. It is named Rama after the Hindu god,[6] and an uncrewed space probe dubbed Sita is launched from the Mars moon Phobos to intercept and photograph it. The resulting images reveal that Rama is a perfect cylinder, 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter and 50 kilometres (31 mi) long, and almost completely featureless, making this humankind's first encounter with an alien spacecraft.

The solar survey vessel Endeavour is sent to study Rama, as it is the only ship close enough to do so in the brief period Rama will spend in the Solar System. Endeavour manages to rendezvous with Rama one month after it first comes to Earth's attention, when the alien ship is already inside Venus's orbit. The crew, led by Commander Bill Norton, enters Rama through a safety system consisting of triple airlocks, and explores the 16-km wide by 50-km long cylindrical world of its interior, but the nature and purpose of the starship and its creators remain enigmatic throughout the book. Rama's inner surfaces hold "cities" of geometric structures that resemble buildings and are separated by streets with shallow trenches. A band of water, dubbed the Cylindrical Sea, stretches around Rama's central circumference. Massive spires, which are theorised to be part of Rama's propulsion system, stand at its "southern" end. They also find that Rama's atmosphere is breathable.

One of the crew members, Jimmy Pak, who has experience with low gravity skybikes, rides a smuggled skybike along Rama's axis to the far end, otherwise inaccessible due to the cylindrical sea and the 500m high cliff on the opposite shore. Once at the massive metal cones on the southern end of Rama, Jimmy detects magnetic and electric fields coming from the cones, which increase, resulting in lightning. Due to his proximity to the spires, the concussion from a discharge damages his skybike causing him to crash on the isolated southern continent.

When Pak wakes up, he sees a crab-like creature picking up his skybike and chopping it into pieces. He cannot decide whether it is a robot or a biological alien, and keeps his distance while radioing for help. As Pak waits, Norton sends a rescue party across the cylindrical sea, using a small, improvised craft, constructed earlier for exploration of the sea's central island. The creature dumps the remains of the skybike into a pit, but ignores Pak himself, who explores the surrounding fields while waiting for the rescue party to arrive. Amongst the strange geometric structures, he sees an alien flower growing through a cracked tile in the otherwise sterile environment, and decides to take it as both a curiosity and for scientific research.

Pak jumps off the 500m cliff, his descent slowed by the low gravity and using his shirt as a drogue parachute, and is quickly rescued by the waiting boat. As they ride back, tidal waves form in the cylindrical sea, created by the movements of Rama itself as it makes course corrections. When the crew arrives at base, they see a variety of odd creatures inspecting their camp. When one is found damaged and apparently lifeless, the team's doctor/biologist Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst inspects it, and discovers it to be a hybrid biological entity and robot—eventually termed a "biot". It, and by assumption the others, are powered by internal batteries (much like those of terrestrial electric eels) and possess some intelligence. They are believed to be the drones of Rama's still-absent builders.

The members of the Rama Committee and the United Planets, both based on the Moon, have been monitoring events inside Rama and giving feedback. The Hermian colonists have concluded that Rama is a potential threat and send a rocket-mounted nuclear bomb to destroy it should it prove to pose a threat. Lt. Boris Rodrigo takes advantage of the five minute transmission delay and uses a pair of wire cutters to defuse the bomb and its control.

As Rama approaches perihelion, and on their final expedition, the crew decide to visit the city closest to their point of entry, christened "London", and use a laser to cut open one of the "buildings" to see what it houses. They discover transparent pedestals containing holograms of various artefacts, which they theorise are used by the Ramans as templates for creating tools and other objects. One hologram appears to be a uniform with bandoliers, straps and pockets that suggests the size and shape of the Ramans. As the crew photographs some of the holograms, the biots begin returning to the cylindrical sea, where they are recycled by aquatic biots ('sharks') and the six striplights that illuminate Rama's interior start to dim, prompting the explorers to leave Rama and to re-board Endeavour.

With Endeavour a safe distance away, Rama reaches perihelion and utilizes the Sun's gravitational field, and its mysterious "space drive", to perform a slingshot manoeuvre which flings it out of the Solar System and towards an unknown destination in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

John Leonard of The New York Times, while finding Clarke "benignly indifferent to the niceties of characterization," praised the novel for conveying "that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable, that distinguishes sci-fi at its most technically imaginative."[7] Other reviewers have also commented on Clarke's lack of character development and overemphasis on realism.[8]

An artist's impression of the interior of Rama.

The interior of Rama is essentially a large cylindrical landscape, dubbed "The Central Plain" by the crew, 16 kilometres in diameter and nearly 50 long, with artificial gravity provided by its 0.25 rpm spin. It is split into the "northern" and "southern" plains, divided in the middle by a 10-km wide expanse of water the astronauts dub the "Cylindrical Sea". In the center of the Cylindrical Sea is an island of unknown purpose covered in tall, skyscraper-like structures, which the astronauts name "New York" due to an imagined similarity to Manhattan. At each end of the ship are North and South "Poles". The North Pole is effectively the bow and the South Pole the stern, as Rama accelerates in the direction of the north pole and its drive system is at the South Pole.

The North Pole contains Rama's airlocks, and is where the Endeavour lands. The airlocks open into the hub of the massive bowl shaped cap at the North Pole, with three 8-kilometre long stair systems, called Alpha, Beta, and Gamma by the crew, leading to the plain.

The Northern plain contains several small "towns" interconnected by roads, dubbed London, Paris, Peking, Tokyo, Rome, and Moscow. The South Pole has a giant cone-shaped protrusion ("Big Horn") surrounded by six smaller ones ("Little Horns"), which are thought to be part of Rama's reactionless space drive.

Both ends of Rama are lit by giant trenches (three in the northern plain and three in the south), equidistantly placed around the cylinder, effectively functioning as giant strip lighting.

Clarke paired up with Gentry Lee for the remainder of the series. Lee wrote while Clarke read and made editing suggestions.[9] The focus and style of the last three novels are quite different from those of the original with an increased emphasis on characterisation and clearly-portrayed heroes and villains, rather than Clarke's dedicated professionals. These later books did not receive the same critical acclaim and awards as the original.

• Rendezvous with Rama (1973) 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

Gentry Lee also wrote two further novels set in the same Rama Universe.

• Bright Messengers (1995)
• Double Full Moon Night (1999)

Number of NEOs detected by various projects:

LINEAR   NEAT   Spacewatch   LONEOS

CSS   Pan-STARRS   NEOWISE   other

Clarke created the space study program which detects Rama, Project Spaceguard, as a method of identifying near-Earth objects on Earth-impact trajectories; in the novel it was initiated in 2077. A real project named Spaceguard was initiated in 1992, named after Clarke's fictional project and "with the permission and encouragement of Clarke".[23] After interest in the dangers of asteroid strikes was heightened by a series of Hollywood disaster films, the United States Congress gave NASA authorisation and funding to support Spaceguard. By 2017, there were a number of different efforts to detect potentially dangerous asteroids.

On 19 October 2017 an incoming interstellar object was discovered by Pan-STARRS, a system similar to Spaceguard. Like Rama, the object had an unusually elongated shape. Before the official Hawaiian name ʻOumuamua was selected by the International Astronomical Union, a popular choice was Rama.[24][25]

• O'Neill cylinder
• McKendree cylinder
• Generation starship

• Rendezvous with Rama title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Rendezvous with Rama at Open Library
• Rendezvous with Rama at Worlds Without End