[HN Gopher] Rendezvous with Rama
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Rendezvous with Rama
Author : Vermin2000
Score : 67 points
Date : 2026-03-09 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.engora.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.engora.com)
| Vermin2000 wrote:
| Some thoughts on the novel: its strengths and weaknesses, why
| it's so different from other first contact novels. I'd love to
| hear people's views of the novel.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Like the other poster wrote, interesting mystery/plot, poor
| characterization shared with all of his work I have read - one
| thing that sticks out was the overly long bit about the man's
| fascination with his female partner's breasts in zero gravity
| could be taken as weird.
| wsowens wrote:
| Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favorites as a teenager,
| hopefully the film adaptation does it justice.
| ggm-at-algebras wrote:
| If he'd stopped after one, it would have been fine. He decided to
| do a series. It got weird. I still read them but the original is
| a decent standalone and you won't die unhappy if you never read
| the following.
|
| The same could be said of 2001.
| XorNot wrote:
| I thought 3001 was fine and a good conclusion.
|
| Although it seemed implausible in the setting that humanity
| wasn't immortal given some of the technology.
| zem wrote:
| I remember 3001 mainly for the bit about deism vs theism,
| which is one of my favourite throwaway passages in all of sf.
|
| 8<-------------------
|
| "You said that all the old religions have been discredited.
| So what do people believe nowadays?"
|
| "As little as possible. We're all either Deists or Theists."
|
| "You've lost me. Definitions, please."
|
| "They were slightly different in your time, but here are the
| latest versions. Theists believe there's not more than one
| God; Deists that there is not less than one God."
|
| "I'm afraid the distinction's too subtle for me."
|
| "Not for everyone; you'd be amazed at the bitter
| controversies it's aroused. Five centuries ago, someone used
| what's known as surreal mathematics to prove there's an
| infinite number of grades between Theists and Deists. Of
| course, like most dabblers with infinity, he went insane."
| ggm-at-algebras wrote:
| Nothing in this thread makes me feel I should change my
| mind but de gustibus and all that.
| qingcharles wrote:
| All I remember from 3001 was a bit about velociraptors
| being used as gardeners and babysitters.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I feel the stories got successively smaller from 2010 and on.
| 2010's epilogue hints at the developments after 20,000 years,
| and 2061 and 3001 feel small in comparison.
|
| 2010 is a good follow on to the 2001 book, and answers some
| of the questions the first book left while expanding the
| mysteries and the sense of wonder.
|
| My wife and I still quote it when answering questions such as
| what's for dinner.
|
| "Something wonderful".
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Officially, all the Rama sequels were co-authored by Clarke and
| Gentry Lee. Clarke claimed that Lee did virtually all the
| writing and he was only a consultant, although AFAICT the only
| source for this claim was in an interview many years after they
| were published, presumably after Clarke was aware of their
| negative reception, so who knows how much of that is true vs.
| reputation management.
|
| But yeah, they're awful. I read them when I was 12-13 and it
| was one of my first introductions to the idea that sequels to
| great books could be so bad (and then for some reason I went on
| to read the Brian Herbert Dune prequels, which are even worse).
| Read the first one, and pretend it stopped there.
| ggm-at-algebras wrote:
| It would seem passing strange that Gentry Lee came up with
| all the awful bits and the consulting oversight didn't.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I've read almost all of Arthur C. Clarke's novels. The Rama
| sequels are _nothing_ like his work. It 's easy to believe
| that he barely contributed.
| rbanffy wrote:
| By the same time he did The Hammer of God, which is
| great.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I always felt that Gentry Lee kidnapped Clarke and forced
| him to be his co-author.
|
| Clarke was so much of a better writer than the [2010|Rama]
| sequels indicate. He would not be able to screw it up so
| thoroughly without extensive "help".
|
| Clarke also made some good partnerships - Richter 10 is a
| very good book. Sadly, the partner died and never worked
| with Clarke again. Gentry Lee would be my main suspect.
| metaphor wrote:
| In my mind, the prose of the sequels were so unlike Clarke
| when I read them as a teen that it created a long stint of
| aversion towards spending time on anything with co-authors. I
| owe Rendezvous a lot though; had I not discovered that book
| as a kid, there's little chance I'd be reading recreationally
| today.
| rendleflag wrote:
| The sequel series was one of my favorite sets of books. It's
| markedly different from Rendezvous, but I found them an
| enjoyable read. It was contrived at points, but the series
| had my favorite ending for a character.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 2010 is also good. The movie is also competent, but it could
| never fill the shoes 2001 left.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I am a big fan of both films, and have over many years come
| to the firm conclusion that, while _2010: The Year We Make
| Contact_ could never live up to its best-films-of-all-time
| predecessor, it's both a terrific film on its own merits and
| could be tweaked even today to be better.
|
| What it needs, fundamentally, is the _Blade Runner_
| treatment: Kill the expository voiceover, tighten up the
| edit, make the ending less sentimental and more mysterious.
| abraxas wrote:
| For those who already read Rendezvous with Rama but need their
| alien aliens fix I can highly recommend "Shroud" by Adrian
| Tchaikovsky. It is a similar theme with modern writing and
| convincing aliens as is pretty much expected by now from
| Tchaikovsky.
| gbourne wrote:
| Children of Time was excellent, so thank for this
| recommendation.
| jayGlow wrote:
| the fourth book in that series comes out later this week if
| you haven't been keeping up with him
| Pepe1vo wrote:
| I'll admit I'm quite anxious for Children of Strife.
| Children of Time is an all-time favorite, but each
| subsequent book in the series was a bit of a
| disappointment. Fingers crossed this one turns the tide
| stoneman24 wrote:
| For me, not so much a decrease in quality but more of an
| evolution as the landscape of sentient beings expands.
| The paired covids in the last book, were a great
| addition.
|
| Don't normally buy a hard cover or kindle (I like the
| paperback) but I may do that for book 4 "Children of
| Strife"
| shagie wrote:
| I kind of agree with you on that... and I kind of
| understand why.
|
| The first book was an exploration of humanity in the
| stars. While there was contact, it had more the
| traditional science fiction footing that we're familiar
| with.
|
| The second book was getting into the exploration of the
| mind and _other_ minds. While the first book touched on
| the mind - with spiders being more relatable to how we
| think... the 2nd book presented us with something more
| alien in how the octopus thinks... and something even
| more alien.
|
| The third book was downright confusing until the end and
| was more of a philosophy book about the mind. Can one
| mind be in two bodies? What entails _thought_? What is
| identity? ... and for that matter, what is reality?
|
| The 2nd and 3rd books are good (and interesting) science
| fiction, but they go much deeper into exploring
| philosophy than many other science fiction books and use
| the scaffold of the universe to explore the mind rather
| than _technological advancement_. The upgrade of
| technology and how that changes things isn 't the focus
| of the story - as one would expect in more traditional
| science fiction, but rather an exploration of a new mind.
| That change in the expectation from the first to the
| second (and third) book has some wish for more of that
| first book with the challenges of humans (as we can
| understand them).
|
| Book 1 is a first contact story with survival. Book 2 is
| a psychological mystery about alien cognition (and a bit
| of horror to it too - "we're going on an adventure" gives
| me shivers). Book 3 is _much_ more of a puzzle around
| unreliable narration and reality.
|
| For me, I enjoyed the first book. I was confused by the
| 2nd book because of the change in the "it's not about the
| technology and survival anymore...". The 3rd book
| confused me on the first pass through it. The second time
| going through it and understanding where things were
| leading and being able to pick out the changes made more
| sense... even though I was expecting a book about the
| mind rather than science (the first pass through I
| thought it was more about the crow's minds).
| ternus wrote:
| A mere month after Pretenders to the Throne of God. You
| have to admire his output.
| oniony wrote:
| I enjoyed Children of Time and also A Fire Upon the Deep, if
| you're looking for more recommendations.
| cyphertruck wrote:
| I just read a series of his books involving "unspace" so nice
| to see a recommendation. Will check out Shroud.
| Pepe1vo wrote:
| I liked shroud a lot, but the ending felt very ungratifying.
| It's like Tchaikovsky wrote himself into a corner and didn't
| really know how to wrap it up nicely. I find this to be true of
| some of his other books as well.
| abraxas wrote:
| To each their own. I did not expect the ending and found it
| quite satisfying.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Tchaikovsky has written some of the best books I have ever read
| like Children of Time and Children of Ruin and also some of the
| worst books I have ever read like Cage of Souls.
| arionmiles wrote:
| I decided to get back into reading two years ago and I picked
| this as one of the first ones to get started with, given it was a
| small book. I absolutely love Arthur C. Clarke's style of helping
| you visualize the grand scenes.
|
| His books are more plot driven and the characters are pretty
| flat, but it's so damn fun to read through!
|
| Morgan Freeman has been trying to get the movie adaptation made
| since early 2000s and wants to play Commander Norton. I had read
| that Denis Villenueve (the same director from the new Dune
| movies) was attached to direct the adaptation, but it seems like
| his schedule is really busy. He recently finished filming Dune
| Messiah and then he's got the next James Bond movie to deliver.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I read it as a young teen, and I remember trying to imagine what
| it might look like to enter a cylinder that large.
|
| I remember having fun doing it, which might not be something I
| could amuse myself with 20 years later since it's hard to hold on
| to that kind of childlike wonder unless you're on a hallucinogen.
| cyphertruck wrote:
| Been following this movie's development for over 20 years. I give
| props to Morgan Freeman for trying so hard all this time to get
| it made. Denis Villeneuve would be a great director for this, and
| he could make it work.
|
| Let's hope it happens soon... finally.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The biggest danger in giving Rama to Villeneuve is the studios
| deciding to make the sequels as well.
| oniony wrote:
| I really enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama when I read it as a sixteen
| year old. The sense of awe, the scale, the mystery: it was great.
| But nothing much happened and the story didn't really go anywhere
| interesting.
|
| I eagerly read the sequel, hoping it would unveil the mysteries,
| but it felt like it was not written by Clarke at all (I suspect
| Lee wrote it all). Instead of wonder, sci-fi and reveal, it was
| more about the human relationships of the astronauts and less
| about the sci-fi.
| jeltz wrote:
| I too got bored, as you said the book did not seem to go
| anywhere.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Same with Stranger in a Strange Land
| rbanffy wrote:
| > I too got bored, as you said the book did not seem to go
| anywhere.
|
| I tried to rationalise those humans were from a world very
| different from my own, but not even that worked. It was like
| watching a reality show with uninteresting people.
| garciasn wrote:
| It was a great story, right up until the lack of an ending.
| As someone who reads lots of books, I will NEVER understand
| authors who don't wrap up a story.
|
| It's like someone telling you a story and you ask, "and then
| what happened," and they reply, "nothing; that's the end of
| the story." No one appreciates that, but people rave about
| authors who leave "open-end interpretations!"
| pavlov wrote:
| I always thought that, out of the Clarke novels, "Songs of
| Distant Earth" would make a good movie adaptation.
|
| Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script
| jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation. (I
| actually like the Apple TV version, but it's definitely its own
| thing.)
|
| For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts, Lem's "Solaris"
| still holds its own, and the Tarkovsky movie is its own
| standalone classic (again something very different from the
| book).
| poisonarena wrote:
| back in 1994, when I was 9 years old, one of my favorite albums
| that got me into electronic music as a young boy was the
| concept album "Songs of Distant Earth" by Mike Oldfield.. Also
| the remixes by Jam&Spoon.. I think he released some kind of
| weird software about it too.. I think its time to finally read
| the book.
|
| https://youtu.be/gRivMEEZZE8?si=S1ZCDAg9Sl37jwoX full album
| zem wrote:
| "a fall of moondust" would translate extremely well to screen,
| and "the martian" has shown that it's the kind of movie that
| would do well enough in terms of reception.
| teamonkey wrote:
| The first Clarke I read as a kid and still one of my
| favourites. It hasn't aged well, not least because it was
| written before we landed on the moon and now know its surface
| isn't like that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I actually like the Apple TV version, but it's definitely
| its own thing._
|
| I do, too, but I had to accept that the books basically gave us
| names; and that's about it.
|
| The books would have been a complete snooze-fest, if they had
| been accurately rendered.
| dexwiz wrote:
| I'd all the Southern Reach trilogy (quadrilogy? now) to this
| list. It's more on the cosmic/eldritch side, but similar sense
| of unknowable.
|
| SPOILER WARNING
|
| My interruption is that Area X/The Crawler is a probe built to
| study and build a bridge back to its creator. Area X is
| expanding because it's the inside of a wormhole. But whatever
| is on the other side is long dead, and the probe is acting on
| instinct.
| dbspin wrote:
| Counterpoint, I very much enjoyed the sequels (all but the
| last). They added three dimensional characters, especially
| women and explored a variety of aspects of first contact.
| They're a believable examination of how humans recreate the
| same social ills over and over, given the opportunity for
| utopia.
| nradov wrote:
| The latest episode of Rick Rubin's Tetragrammaton podcast has
| an interview with Eric Roth who adapted the screenplay for
| _Rendezvous with Rama_.
|
| https://www.tetragrammaton.com/content/eric-roth
| the_biot wrote:
| As much as I love "Songs of Distant Earth", I suspect a
| Hollywood version of it would amount to "giant lobsters vs
| space marines", whereas in the book they're a minor sideshow.
| cal_dent wrote:
| I tend to agree. I've always thought it would work well as a
| TV show in the more heady days of streaming (let's say 2012 -
| 2020) when networks and studios where it still felt like they
| had some room to take more risk. It's more towards the end of
| the last TV "golden age" but an adaptation like something
| like Apple's take on "Tales from the Loop". Not brash or loud
| or too formulaic but somehow still got made
| yaman12 wrote:
| Making it a movie would ruin it. Unless it was more of a
| "Literary" film like 2001 and even then a fancy director would
| have to stray from the original to make it work visually and add
| conflict. Just read it. I believe in Rama's premise. Aliens just
| wouldn't be interested in us in the same way we're not interested
| in local squirrel population. Rama answers the "great filter"
| question. Where is all the intelligent life going in universe?
| Right under our noses doing its thing while we do ours. Maybe on
| our AI will be interesting to aliens.
| ternus wrote:
| "Wonder" might be the wrong way to describe it, but Blindsight by
| Peter Watts gave me the same feeling of "this is incredibly alien
| and I have no idea what will happen next".
|
| Other books with a similar plot structure and deeply alien vibe:
|
| - Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (recommended elsewhere in this
| thread)
|
| - Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
|
| I know there's one I'm forgetting.
| kryptn wrote:
| While reading Pushing Ice a very common thought I had was "did
| Reynolds want to do a Rama sequels?"
|
| Shroud is great, easy recommendation. Another of Tchaikovsky,
| Alien Clay, also great, also very alien.
| dmbche wrote:
| For Peter Watts - Echopraxia is just as wonderful as
| Blindsight, highly recommend.
| ternus wrote:
| DO NOT READ THE SEQUELS
|
| One of the few cases where they actively ruin the first book, to
| the extent you take them as true sequels. Clarke basically
| licensed his name and plot to Gentry Lee, who proceeded to ruin
| the sense of wonder by explaining everything, often in deeply
| unsatisfactory ways. They would have been reasonable scifi books
| (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the
| classics.
|
| Star Wars prequel/sequel situation.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| I'm glad someone else said this because I was right about to.
| One of the things I love about Rama 1 is how it squashes the
| idea of a human centric universe where everything has to occur
| for reasons knowable by us. Rama is truly alien, inscrutable
| and fulfilling a purpose we don't get to understand. As soon as
| it enters our solar system, its gone for good, leaving a lot
| unanswered.
| arjie wrote:
| The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read
| them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny
| human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the
| population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade
| cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's
| not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you
| were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks
| about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then
| everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives
| or something.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "the first part talks about Hitler 's invasion of Poland
| in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the
| affairs among the officers' wives or something"_
|
| Sounds like Tolstoy...
| kryptn wrote:
| I enjoyed the sequels but they're a completely separate story
| to me, and I don't think I'd read them again.
|
| I didn't go in with the expectation that they'd be just like
| Rendezvous with Rama.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| As someone who was saved from reading the sequels due to online
| warnings, it's good to see that the next generation is being
| warned off of them also.
| WA wrote:
| Another recommendation, not a first contact story, but a very
| weird world and you wonder why things are how they are:
|
| Inverted World by Christopher Priest
| chuckledog wrote:
| Anyone play the Apple II video game by Telerium? Slow, but it did
| evoke that sense of wonder
| https://youtu.be/ITxhoiXiXRY?si=n21imKGMjqyjmQld
| acheron wrote:
| Re: 2001
|
| > Clarke wrote the movie screenplay with Kubrick
|
| I don't think this is true? I thought the two of them sat
| together and worked out the plot, and then Kubrick went off and
| wrote the screenplay and Clarke went off and wrote the novel. So
| neither is really "based on" the other.
|
| Anyway though, Rama is great, yes. I'm skeptical of the idea of a
| movie adaptation but Denis Villeneuve is probably the right one
| to try to pull it off.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Clarke's book _The Lost Worlds of 2001_ goes into a lot of
| detail about the process (and is a great read in its own
| right). His take was that the book should say "a novel by
| Arthur C Clarke, based on the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick"
| and the movie should say "screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based
| on the novel by Arthur C Clarke".
|
| I think Kubrick was very much the dominant force in the
| partnership, but they did work quite closely together.
| ssteeper wrote:
| I'm not fundamentally opposed to the use of AI to generate
| accompanying imagery, but in this case I think it detracts
| significantly from the article. The interior of Rama is
| misrepresented: the scale is completely off and the geometry is
| nonsensical. The clustered "cities" London, Paris, and Rome are
| not represented correctly. Too many more issues to name.
| Disappointing.
|
| One should cherish one's own internal visualizations formed from
| reading the text; one should be cautious in viewing other
| artists' conceptions of the same material, lest your own model of
| the book's setting be tainted by unfaithful representations. When
| the imagery is this bad, it's a disservice to the book's legacy.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| This reminded me that they made a point-and-click game of Rama. I
| remember enjoying it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game)
| mattschaller wrote:
| I remember hearing that Morgan Freeman was going to star in the
| Rendezvous with Rama movie. I also remember hearing once that
| they were making a 2061 and 3001 movie. Not quite sure which
| series I enjoyed more.
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