Rendezvous with Rama

Author: Samuel Peterson

Date Published
2020-03-24 (ISO 8601)
75-03-24 (Post Bomb)

In the summer of 73(PB) my wife, Elliott and I went to Finnish woods near Äänekoski to visit a good friend of Amanda's named Teemu Öhman. I had a grand time getting to know Teemu, who turned out to be a very engaging fellow. At some point during the visit, I asked about his tastes in science-fiction literature. Teemu replied that he particularly enjoyed the writings of Arthur C. Clarke, and gave the work "Rendezvous with Rama" a specific recommendation.

For whatever reason, Arthur C. Clarke is an author who had never been on my radar, so I was pleased with this recommendation. About a year after our visit I began reading "Rendezvous with Rama" to Amanda, and I enjoyed it enough to write about it here.

In this task, I am somewhat constrained. I usually do not pay much heed to the imperative to avoid spoilers(the divulging of unexpected elements of the plot to a reader who potentially is ignorant of the story in question); I think the notion that such details ruin most stories is absurd. However, in this case such concerns are far more credible. The story is all about discovering the truly alien, and I found the principle of appeal of the story to be the sense of discovery and mystery of it all. Incidentally, this story would probably suffer greatly on a second reading because of the resulting prescience of the reader.

I shall therefore restrict any plot elements to those in the first quarter or so of the book, other items from the book will be mentioned in the separate page of spoilers. This should be enough to provide the setup, a general sense of the book's strengths, and yet will not ruin anything about the story.

The Premise

The entire story is about a starship from some unknown part of the Milky Way Galaxy (presumably) entering the Solar system on an apparent fly-by, and the rendezvous conducted by the only manned spaceship which has the velocity, the mass, and fuel needed to make such a rendezvous in the time-window provided.

Humanity by this time (2130 AD, 185 PB) has mostly gotten its act together. They have colonized much of the inner solar system, and have a species-wide political framework that resembles a functional government. The impetus for this collective action was the impact of a large meteorite in northern Italy which took out a good chunk of southern Europe. The response was the formation of an international space-faring body called Spaceguard whose task is to monitor the skies and to be prepared to prevent the next such catastrophic event. It was this project which focused humanities' energies over the next half-century, and such is the setup for the events in the book.

Rama

53 years after the formation of Spaceguard, a new body is detected outside the orbit of Jupiter. Jupiter at this time is still remote enough for it to take years until humans get a close look at it. The body is called Rama, from the Hindu pantheon as the graeco-roman one is used up. The rest of the book involves the piece-wise revelation about what Rama is.

At first, all that is known is it's size: big; a diameter of 40 km. Just the sort of thing that Spaceguard was meant to track.

Then its trajectory is determined: Hyperbolic, not elliptic. Rama is a visitor from outside the solar system, making a one-time-only fly-by.

Then they find out that Rama is spinning at a rate of one revolution every 4 minutes -- much faster than would be expected for an asteroid of its size.

Then they get a close-up picture of it. Rama is perfectly cylindrical. There is no other plausible explanation for this: Rama is artificial, which is where the excitement about it really starts; it is effectively the beginning of our little adventure.

The Explorers

Commander Edward Norton of the vessel Endeavour is chosen to make the rendezvous for the simple reason that his is the only vessel which could make it in time. He's an arch-typical male hero of the time before such notions as "Toxic Masculinity" were given any attention. He's smart, decisive, calm of nerve; Women sense his power, and seek his essence.

Yes he's a stereotype, but that's OK. The book is clearly not about character development. He is afforded one little personal touch: he idolizes Captain Cook, who also commanded a vessel named Endeavour, and when Captain Ed is unsure of himself he tries to answer the question "What would Cook do?".

The rest of the cast that make up the Endeavour's crew are similarly developed. Although they are lacking in richness or depth they possess something which needs to be present in at least some characters in a good science-fiction story: they are believably depicted as intelligent, disciplined, and possessing a solid understanding of their jobs. Put another way: they are highly competent people in a profession that requires a fit analytical mind and a good dose of courage.

Although the crew is calm under pressure, they are by no means reckless. Much attention is taken to depict the great pains they take in minimizing risk throughout the exploration: from carefully considering the effects of centrifugal forces on a body such as this, to estimating the physical limits of a crew that has been in a low-gravity environment for months or years. Far from leading to a boring story, this caution and professionalism for me was very satisfying to read.

The Tone of the Book

There is a wonderful segment which from the book which I must put here as it typifies the style throughout. The characters are always trying to figure out what they are seeing, and this picture evolves as more data comes in. This quotation is taken after they find out Rama's rotational period, but before they find out it is an artifact. The character mentioned in the quotation is Dr. Stenton, who is the astronomer who first identifies the rotational period:

The only specimen of the celestial zoo that fitted this description was a collapsed star. Perhaps Rama was a dead sun, a madly spinning sphere of neutronium, every cubic centimeter weighing billions of tons.

At this point there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Well's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy. Across more than two centuries of time it lost none of its magic and its terror. He would never forget the images of hurricanes and tidal waves, of cities sliding into the sea, as that other visitor from the stars smashed into Jupiter and then fell sunward past the Earth. True, the star that old Wells described was not cold, but incandescent, and wrought much of its destruction by heat. That scarcely mattered; even if Rama was a cold body, reflecting only the light of the Sun, it could kill by gravity as easily as by fire.

Any stellar mass intruding into the solar system would completely distort the orbits of the planets. The Earth had only to move a few million kilometers sunward -- or starward -- for the delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The antarctic icecap could melt and flood all low-lying land; or the oceans could freeze and the whole world be locked in eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough...

Then Stenton relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief. This was all nonsense; he should be ashamed of himself.

Rama could not possibly be made of condensed matter. No star-sized mass could penetrate so deeply into the solar system without producing disturbances that would have betrayed it long ago [...] No, it was utterly impossible for an object as massive as a dead sun to sneak up unobserved.

There are also some fun little details:

• genetically engineered chimpanzees, or simps, which are used to assist in ship-board physical tasks
• Polygamy -- among space-farers it is not uncommon for people to have multiple families on different planets
• greatly prolonged lifespans, and some of the problems that come out of that condition; particularly that of administrative staleness or stagnation.
• Sporting events which only make sense in a low-g environment, like aerial biking.
• A new religion: Cosmo-Christers, who believe Jesus was an Extra-Terrestrial visitor.

The book has also aged fairly well for science fiction. It shies away from too fine-grained details that would date it horribly otherwise. It sticks to well-established orbital mechanics, and it leaves the computers essentially as black-boxes (which in my opinion is the biggest exposure to obsolescence in 1970s sci-fi).

Final Thoughts

Outside of the above, and the contents of the spoilers page, all I have left to say is that it was a fun bit of discovery of the unknown. Over the couple of weeks that I was reading "Rendezvous with Rama", I was frequently thinking of it, wondering what this or that new thing was which the book was introducing. In short I was immersed in the sense of discovery. It's a thought-provoking work, which I'll continue to remember fondly.