Rendezvous With Rama

One of my reading blind spots is classic science fiction. Partially this is because the few attempts I have made to engage with SF novels from the 50s to the early 80s have left me utterly cold, partially it’s because reading modern authors who draw inspiration from that stuff like Alastair Reynolds have also left me utterly cold. I greatly enjoy modern “soft” sci-fi and I have unlimited time for your HG Wellses and you Mary Shelleys, but in between there’s a large gulf of relatively hard sci-fi authors writing about beep-boop spaceships that I just don’t have much interest in engaging with.

I’ve been meaning for a long time to make an exception for Arthur C. Clarke’s 1971 novel Rendezvous With Rama. It was one of my brother’s favourite books when we were radical teens, it’s supposedly getting a movie adaptation directed by Denis Villenevue, and wouldn’t you know it, I happen to have the entire four-volume omnibus sitting on my Kindle due to a sale some time ago. Time to see what all the fuss is about.

The plot: it’s Future Times and humans have colonised the solar system with fancy Future Times space technology. A long-range radio telescope spots what at first appears to be a large asteroid heading for the sun, it turns out to actually be an ancient artificial structure that humanity names Rama, a mission is hastily dispatched to probe its secrets before it flies too close to the sun, the astronauts get inside, it’s an O’Neill Cylinder-esque space colony whose inhabitants are nowhere to be seen, mystery and intrigue ensue.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound flippant. It’s just that describing, or even naming, any of the characters would be giving them more importance than the book itself does. This is very much a story about Rama, with the human explorers serving as vehicles for the audience to piggyback onto while they probe its mysteries. What character traits and interests they have mostly serve to highlight aspects of the setting’s technology or wacky future sociology. The politicians and advisors of the United Planets assembly, who the book periodically cuts away to, are even flimsier, to the point that I kept forgetting which one was supposed to be a viewpoint character.

Just as the book doesn’t really have characters, it would be a bit generous to describe it as having a plot. Sure, things happen; the mission to Rama and the individual astronauts are jeapordized by factors both within and without. But those obstacles are all solved in short order via the application of scientific know-how and some personal grit. You could describe the entire story as “some astronauts go to Rama, they spend a few weeks there, they leave” and it wouldn’t be inaccurate. The crew of the ship sent to explore Rama overwhelmingly get along with each other fine, no one dies or is seriously injured, there is some political intrigue when the inhabitants of Mercury decide Rama might be a threat to their planet but, again, that gets resolved fairly quickly.

So that all begs the question: can you build a good novel solely on what amounts to a long description of a fictional location? For the most part, yes, I think you can, and Arthur C. Clark managed it back in 1971.

Granted, it doubtlessly loses something when you come to it some fifty-odd years after the fact. For a lot of people in the 70s, this book was probably the first time they encountered a lot of theoretical science ideas like centrifugal artificial gravity. In the decades since those concepts have spread much more into popular culture, no doubt in part due to the popularity of this book, and so the amount of time spent elucidating them can, to a modern reader, feel a bit excessive. That’s not as much of a problem as it might have been, though: the book is fairly short, it’s fast-paced with chapters that cheerfully skip over the boring bits to get to the juicy SF nuggets, and it doesn’t spend a lot of time belabouring descriptions, even when those descriptions are of fantastical things. The writing is also capable of getting nicely atmospheric when the need arises, such as during the team’s initial explorations of Rama’s interior before the lights come on. I can see why it would appeal to a director with as strong an eye for visuals as Villeneuve, although equally I can see why no prior film adaptation has ever gotten off the ground because, you know, movies generally need to have stories.

One thing I greatly admire about the book is its restraint. Over the course of their mission, our daring astronauts barely scratch the surface of what Rama is and how it operates. Many, if not most, of the strange technological wonders they encounter there are left completely unexplained, so that Rama becomes just as much an unsolvable puzzle to the reader as it is to the solar system it leaves behind. At no point do we even find out anything about the beings that created it; the closest the book comes is some clues to their physical dimensions. Apparently the sequels, mostly written by Gentry Lee, rectify this. They are also apparently not very good.

This restraint also applies to the technology of the book’s setting. We are told that spaceships in this era are much faster than the ones we have now, but no attempt is made to explain how. Genetic engineering, ultra long-range satellite communication, glider vehicles made out of advanced feather-light polymers, and IVF conception (the latter of which wouldn’t exist in real life until seven years after the book’s publication) are all introduced as either plot devices or background flavour, without any tedious pauses to unpack how they operate. Frankly, this is an example a lot of SF and fantasy writers working today could do well to emulate.

With science fiction of this vintage it’s always fun to see what the author “got write” (putting that phrase in scare quotes because of course most SF authors aren’t actually trying to predict the future). Like nearly all of his peers, Clark didn’t see the digital revolution coming and so you’ve got a lot of hilariously antiquated tech like advanced space probes armed with “television cameras”. On the flipside, by using strategically vague language a lot of the book is surprisingly future-proofed: at times characters look at things on “screens”, and while Clark was probably picturing something descended from the analogue TV monitors of the early 70s, because the screens are never described you can easily slot in modern digital devices, or augmented reality technology, or whatever people will be using decades or centuries from now. Similarly, the craft that carries the main characters to Rama is given zero physical description beyond a vague sense of its size and capabilities, which I felt was a particularly good call since the book was written at a time when it must have seemed like spaceflight was going to keep advancing as rapidly as phones and computers have in our time.

Where the book is most prescient is in regard to Rama itself. At the time the book was written, the idea of an interstellar object entering the solar system was purely hypothetical; since 2017 we’ve found multiple, and now that we know what to look for it seems that they’re going to be a regular feature of astronomical study going forwards. Even the way Rama is named is oddly prescient, as the book states it was given an appellation from Hinduism after astronomers ran out of Greek and Roman names to toss around. The same thing has happened in the modern day, including with the first interstellar object ever discovered.

That said, you can’t give Clark too much credit: he also includes a ninth planet in the solar system called Persephone, which is obviously not real…probably.

Apart from treating their worldbuilding like predictions and then dunking on them when they get things wrong, the other fun thing to do with vintage Sci-Fi is examine all the hilarious old-school social attitudes. The book actually tries to get around this by imagining that social mores and customs have evolved alongside technology. For example, polyamory in the future is entirely normalised and widespread, and unless I’m mistaken there’s a few coy sections that seem to hint at homosexuality being likewise destigmatised.

Where the book stumbles a bit is its treatment of women, which is frequently an issue with genre fiction from this era (and prior eras, and later eras, and today as well). On one hand, women occupy lots of important high-ranking positions of expertise and authority. On the other hand there’s this chapter opening, which prior to reading it was the only part of Rendezvous with Rama I had ever seen before because people have been making fun of it at least since the dawn of the internet:

“Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of a well-upholstered lady officer through the control cabin.”

THOSE BROADS IN SPACE AM I RIGHT FELLAS

(For what it’s worth we find out immediately afterwards that Norton has slept with the woman in question in the past and they still have mutual feelings for each other, so this isn’t quite as sleazy in context as it comes across)

Race is also completely absent from the book’s future setting, which seems a bit odd given the time period when Clark would have been writing it. Although since none of the characters are described in much detail, I guess you could imagine the crew of the Endeavour and the United Planets assembly as being a rainbow spectrum of humanity.

So yes, we’ve very much got that endearing mix of genuine effort and ass-backwards ignorance that often characterises attempts at social progressivism from fiction of this era. I’m sure our descendants will find our own cultural output equally cringe, and for what it’s worth I personally feel like Rendezvous With Rama overall isn’t too bad in this regard, even if that’s mostly by virtue of ignoring certain topics.

(By the way I don’t research authors before I review their work because I don’t have the energy to do so, if Arthur C. Clarke was a huge racist or a eugenicist or something feel free to tell everyone about it in the comments).

…But you know what I’m going to be less gracious about? Linguistic drift turning certain word choices into hilarious accidental jokes! It’s not the author’s fault, but I’m still going to clown on him for funsies!

So the spaceship has genetically engineered monkeys who do a lot of the menial or unskilled labour. This is a worldbuilding detail that’s brought up as though it’s going to be important later but then never ends up mattering, because again, the book doesn’t really have a plot.

Now, what do you call intelligent, genetically-engineered monkeys? You can’t just call them “monkeys”, that’s not futuristic enough. We need a special word for these simians…these chimps…these…these…

Simps. That’s what the monkeys are called. Simps.

But wait, it gets funnier!

There’s a crew member who’s in charge of looking after the simps, you see. What is his official job title?

“Sergeant Ravi McAndrews, Chief Steward and Simp Master, was the last person on this ship who would normally get involved in a technical discussion.”

Come up on stage, Simp Master Ravi McAndrews, after fifty years your time has finally arrived!

Look, this joke is going to stop being funny by this time next year, I’m milking it for all I can while I have the chance.

So that’s Rendezvous With Rama: not much of a story, but as a relatively grounded exploration of a fantastical event, it’s a real page turner. I’m not going to read the sequels because they seem ill-conceived from the jump (I don’t think knowing what any of the stuff the team finds inside Rama is for would add anything to the story), but I am really hoping that movie adaptation gets off the ground.