Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Winner of the Campbell, Hugo, Jupiter, and Nebula awards upon its release in 1973, Rendezvous with Rama is widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of Grand Master Arthur C. Clarke's work. By the year 2130, the solar system has been colonized, with humans living on planets ranging from Mercury to the moons of Neptune. Despite so much expansion and discovery, there have been no signs of intelligent life besides our own Earth-born. Until Rama.
Weighing more than ten trillion tons, smoothly shaped, and racing towards the sun at astonishing speed, Rama was no natural object, but clearly an interstellar spacecraft. It appeared to be on course to loop around the Sun, but at a dangerously close orbit. After Commander William Tsien Norton makes the tricky landing of his ship Endeavor on the edge of the colossal craft, he discovers an airlock. Awaiting him on the other side of that portal is a historical moment not experienced since Pizzaro met the Incas or Howard Carter peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen--the a long-hoped-for, but also long-feared encounter with a visitor from beyond the stars.
Synopsis
Astronauts explore an alien spacecraft hurtling toward the sun in this Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel --"a stone-cold classic" of hard sci-fi (The Guardian).
An enormous cylindrical object has entered Earth's solar system on a collision course with the sun. A team of astronauts are sent to explore the mysterious craft, which the denizens of the solar system name Rama. What they find is astonishing evidence of a civilization far more advanced than ours. They find an interior stretching over fifty kilometers; a forbidding cylindrical sea; mysterious and inaccessible buildings; and strange machine-animal hybrids, or "biots," that inhabit the ship. But what they don't find is an alien presence. So who--and where--are the Ramans?
Often listed as one of Clarke's finest novels, Rendezvous with Rama won numerous awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Jupiter, and the British Science Fiction Awards. A fast-paced and compelling story of an enigmatic encounter with alien technology, Rendezvous with Rama offers both answers and unsolved mysteries that will continue to fascinate readers for generations.
"Mr. Clarke is splendid . . . We experience that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable, that distinguishes SF at its most technically imaginative." --The New York Times