Encountering Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

Natur & Kultur has the good taste to breathe some real life into Legenda – the publisher was originally called Askild & Kärnekull and has published everything from Stephen King and Colleen McCullough to Yves Bonnefoy and David Foster Wallace.

The publication begins with Sam J Lundwall’s translation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1974 English novel Meeting with Rama. It’s a lovely return. It also reminds us of the truth that all science fiction is about the time in which it was written, and that the world hasn’t looked the way it did in the first half of the ’70s for a long time. Meeting Rama was the first novel Clarke wrote after collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Adventure, and it has a similar theme: humanity’s first encounter with an unimaginable alien civilization.

The year 2131 discovered The system for controlling potentially threatening asteroids is a new and very large visitor to the solar system. At some point you realize that it is not a natural formation, but a gigantic, tubular, hollow structure. The ship “Endeavor” commanded by Captain Norton is commissioned to carry out a more detailed investigation. The novel follows him and his crew as they manage to get inside and find out where the ship came from and what it is used for.

Arthur C. Clarke is one of the greatest classic science fiction authors whose importance no one would ever belittle. With the other giant, the American Isaac Asimov, he prefers to describe the scientific aspects of the future – he was a trained mathematician and physicist – than to carve out psychologically interesting people.

But that doesn’t do any harm. Perhaps in “Meeting with Rama” he devotes a few dozen pages too many to describing the crew’s inability to comprehend the dimensions of the alien ship and the unpleasant dizziness that could have stopped with just a few sentences because we still understand that it is unimaginable.

A contemporary one Readers of this otherwise dizzying novel are likely to be quite amazed at the relative community that humanity still maintains in the 21st century. Here they stick with the United Planets (Mercury, Earth, Moon, Ganymede, Titan and Triton), which work really well together, unlike today’s more chaotic United Nations. It’s Mercury, with its extraordinary backbone, that stands out, but perhaps for good reason.

And so one is reminded that Clarke knows the academic environment very well. He knows what happens when you put an archaeologist, an exobiologist and an astrophysicist in the same conference room.

Overall, it is an extraordinary novel on the theme of “humanity meets the other”. At a time when the traditional novel is desperate to say something important about our world, it’s a good idea to reissue the classic of speculative fiction and go from there.

You can find more texts by Jonas Thente from DN here and more book reviews by DN here