Rendezvous At Rama

June 01, 2024

I’m currently reading Rendezvous At Rama. It’s a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. Not sure why I never read this sooner, the whole concept is fascinating: a giant alien spaceship enters our solar system and a team of astronauts is sent to investigate.

June 07, 2024

I’m about halfway through and thoroughly enjoying this still. I’m wondering if it’s gonna go off the rails at some point but so far everything is landing for me.

July 07, 2024

Finished the book a few days ago. It never went totally off the rails, it did lose me a little in a few places but then pulled me back in. Overall it was fantastic and it got me wondering about the sequels because there are a lot of unanswered questions. But when I looked into it apparently the sequels are poorly regarded, to the point people are saying it’s better to just leave the gaps to be filled by your own imagination. They were predominately written by Gentry Lee and not Arthur C. Clarke and Lee took things in a different direction. On that note I might still read them, but I’ll treat them like fan fiction and assume only the first book is canonical.

I really enjoyed the mystery of Rama, the idea of discovering this vast alien place and literally everything is unknown. And at the end of it, even after discovering so much, they still know basically nothing about it. It’s realistic in that sense - the crew are only able to explore and learn a limited amount before Rama leaves and that’s it. The book is quite sparse in a lot of ways - the story moves at a rapid pace and I actually found that quite refreshing: if a particular section wasn’t super engaging then in a few pages we’ll have moved on.