Novel: Rendezvous with Rama

Premise
In 2131 the Spaceguard program detects an intruder on a steep solar trajectory, first cataloged as 31/439 and soon renamed Rama. The object proves to be an artificial, perfectly cylindrical worldship about 50 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, tumbling into the inner system on a course that will loop it around the Sun and fling it back into interstellar space. With only weeks to act, Earth dispatches the exploration vessel Endeavour under Commander Bill Norton to intercept and investigate before Rama is gone forever.

Approach and Entry
Endeavour matches spin with the silent giant and locates an airlock at one polar end. Inside, the crew descends into a breathtaking hollow interior: a vaulted cavern whose curved floor is the inner wall of the cylinder, with gentle “gravity” produced by rotation. A circular body of water, the Cylindrical Sea, encircles Rama’s midsection like a gleaming band, dividing two immense continents of textured terrain. At each end, towering structures dubbed the Stairways to Heaven rise toward the axis. Everything is inert and cold at first, as if the ship is dormant while coasting between stars.

Rama Awakens
As Rama nears the Sun, the interior warms and comes alive. Lights bloom along the vast curvature, winds begin to blow, and the sea thaws. Geometric clusters that the explorers nickname “cities” loom above artificial plains, but they are lifeless, more like machine vaults or factories than dwellings. Then the biots appear: an ecology of autonomous, biomimetic machines, crablike sweepers, spiderlike climbers, manta-like flyers, and sharklike swimmers in the sea, emerging to clean, repair, and optimize the environment. Rama offers no signs of inhabitants, only elaborate systems behaving with quiet purpose, guided by an alien logic the crew can only infer.

Exploration and Peril
Clarke follows the crew’s methodical reconnaissance with a hard-science clarity. A daring aerial survey in a lightweight “Dragonfly” glider ends in a storm and crash, forcing a tense rescue across the Cylindrical Sea while predatory biots close in. The explorers probe the “cities,” study the sea’s chemistry, and note the ship’s pervasive triadic symmetry, giving rise to the refrain: Ramans do everything in threes. Each discovery widens the sense of scale and strangeness; even hazards feel like by-products of maintenance rather than aggression. Rama proceeds with indifference to the humans crawling across its skin.

Human Intrigue
Beyond the cylinder, politics intrude. The Hermians, the hard-bitten colonists of Mercury, fear Rama as a potential threat and dispatch a remote-controlled nuclear device to destroy it. Norton’s crew risks everything to avert the detonation, improvising a plan to eject the warhead harmlessly. The episode lays bare the contrast between human anxiety and the ship’s inscrutable composure; Rama neither notices nor responds.

Exit and Enigma
Near perihelion the ship performs its maneuver: internal systems surge, the sea and atmosphere shift, and Rama uses the Sun for a gravitational slingshot, its trajectory adjusted for another starward leg. As quickly as it awakened, the interior begins to quiet; biots dissolve themselves into the sea, lights dim, and the cyclopean machine returns to hibernation. Endeavour withdraws as the cylinder shrinks to a line of reflected sunlight, carrying away every question it brought. No message is sent, no crew is seen, no intention explained, only the elegant proof that an older, larger civilization passes through on business of its own.

Scope and Themes
The novel distills a mood of rigorous wonder: exploration without conquest, contact without conversation. It treats alien intelligence as engineering reality rather than mirror, emphasizing humility, procedure, and the beauty of function. Humanity glimpses vastness and survives an encounter that is at once intimate and utterly impersonal, left with a single gnomic clue repeated like a prayer: “The Ramans do everything in threes.”