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ssteeper 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jacquesm 13 hours ago [-]
Indeed.
ternus 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
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.
qubidt 14 hours ago [-]
> They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.
I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain
CamouflagedKiwi 13 hours ago [-]
It's been a long time now, but from what I remember, you're not wrong. It's often a mistake to try to explain too much in sequels, which they certainly do.
Also they seemed to have a weird obsession about who was going to have sex with who to minimise inbreeding in the next generation. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by not remembering so well, but I recall that seeming pretty weirdly prominent.
arjie 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
> “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…
shiroiuma 12 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about the same Rama sequels by Gentry Lee?
I admit it's been a long time since I read them (maybe 20 years), but I certainly don't remember anything quite like this. I remember it more like the other poster here said: they basically said everyone was corrupt. In a nutshell, Rama comes back to Earth with instructions that a bunch of humans need to come aboard to live out their lives there. But instead of sending their best, some parts of Earth send their worst: criminals and such. So pretty quickly there's several different "cities", with one of them basically run by some crime boss. One of the main characters' daughters gets involved with the crime boss somehow and murders him before killing herself, as payback for killing her father. Later, the human habitat goes to war with the aliens in one of the other habitats, because the humans had broken through to their side and invaded them for some reason I forget. There was even one plot point that the father had hacked into the ship's environmental controls because the humans insisted on having wood-burning fireplaces, even though this messed with the environmental control systems. Instead of just not burning fires, the basically forced him to change the system to accommodate their fireplaces.
But I don't remember any sex slaves. Maybe I forgot that part.
arjie 8 hours ago [-]
All right, I think perhaps then I'm smearing all the sci-fi books I read in my teenage into one. Thanks.
pndy 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you mixed plots together. "Rama II" takes on expedition to the second ship which ends with 3 people being trapped inside and put on a journey outside solar system. Then "The Garden of Rama" describes how these three had to adapt to life on the alien ship. There happens the plot where the main character Nicole has 5 kids, 3 girls with one man and 2 boys with another. First part is written as her journal, then book continues normal narration and focuses on second ship reaching the destination and reasons why they were bought there in the first place. Then, plot with return to the solar system happens where other people were boarded in secrecy on third ship. And it at some point revolves around Nicole's daughter who lives a destructive life.
Unlike others in this comments tree, I liked the other books. These go against the typical space exploration journey where you have humans on their ship surrounded by technology they're familiar with and on which they can fully rely. Here, characters are uncertain of their future - they don't know where they're going, have to adapt to the surroundings, discover the unknown and face downsides of human beings. There's none of that familiar splendor of "going boldly where no man has gone before" or heroic actions, great fights in the outer space. Lee's contribution shows us as small, even unsuited to live among others - here and there.
On the other hand, I'm not fond of his other books where he tried to continue this universe: "Bright Messengers" and "Double Full Moon Night". These felt like distilled, fast-tracked version of "Rama" with more religious overtones because of two characters included.
---
Clarke's own books and these which he co-wrote with other authors have potential for adaptations for the big and small screen. "Rama" series taken by good writers and directors could become a new hit comparable to "Lost" show - which if you stretch some things, feels somehow similar.
m4rtink 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the sequels really were very different and in hindsight not very good. Not to mention kinda too forcefully trying to show how almost everyone is a a corrupt asshole - both humans and large ass well as those almightly aliens sending the Rama craft so they can basically keep samples of sentient population as pets. :P
Yeah, really the original Rama book was it - just image how sequels to the Matrix movie would look like, those could have been even worse!
m463 7 hours ago [-]
It's kind of strange to me that the classic scifi books I read in my youth had few if any follow-ons, and in this case had to resort to other writers to happen.
Meanwhile, many books I read nowadays on kindle routinely have 8 books in a series.
I wonder what makes this happen? Is it that self-publishing that just spits things out with less friction? Less editing and/or second guessing? AI helping? Expectations?
sbinnee 12 hours ago [-]
Lucky for me I didn't read the sequels. I had my own theories about the purpose of Rama. Some theories are best left as theories in your heads to fuel ideas and imagination.
kryptn 15 hours ago [-]
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.
MBCook 10 hours ago [-]
I didn’t even know they existed until this article mentioned them.
I felt similar about the recent authorized sequel to Andromeda Strain.
It didn’t feel like the same universe to me. More like someone was told the book flap description of the first book and a few character names and just wrote from there.
ternus 9 hours ago [-]
There's a sequel to Andromeda Strain? ... Yeah, better off forgetting this information.
rhyperior 9 hours ago [-]
TBH I’m not sure I’ve read anything from Gentry Lee that I really loved.
phendrenad2 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ternus 9 hours ago [-]
They have something like 2 stars on Goodreads. Imagine that as a fairly accurate product review score - if they were Amazon products, they'd be somewhere between "obviously counterfeit" and "burned my house down."
tehnub 14 hours ago [-]
Nah we're not doing prequel hate in 2026
pavlov 15 hours ago [-]
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).
throw0101c 2 hours ago [-]
> Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation.
Denis Villeneuve (Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, Prisoners, etc) is set to direct and is writing the script as well:
> 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.
Apocryphon 14 hours ago [-]
Foundation as a series is already somewhat uneven and less than “pure.” Asimov pulled a Lucas and cluttered it with sequels and prequels that muddled it with connections to his robot novels. Then there’s the additional books by other writers. And if you want to get real picky, Second Foundation gets real pseudoscientific with the pseudo-psionics compared to the first two books.
the_biot 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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
eszed 12 hours ago [-]
I loved "Tales From the Loop", and wished they'd made more. It has a kind of atmospheric sensibility that sticks (with me, at least) long after the details of the plot are forgotten. That's appropriate, I guess, for something based on a portfolio of paintings. It's a hidden gem that I enjoy recommending.
cal_dent 7 hours ago [-]
Yes! Amazing show, one of my favourite shows of the last decade or two. I think what really does it for me is that they really bring the audience into the world itself. I think that's partly because there's no need to always be pushing the plot forward, which I think is a bugbear of mine of newer shows now. There's something to letting things just breathe and tales from the loop really excels at that.
The Phillip Glass soundtrack particularly elevates it too.
pndy 4 hours ago [-]
So basically Avatar just without all the Smurfs huh?
It would be surely minced thru to fit all the standard of the industry - and that's the fear I'm having while craving for screen adaptations of books today.
zem 15 hours ago [-]
"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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dbspin 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ufmace 10 hours ago [-]
I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.
Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.
dexwiz 15 hours ago [-]
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.
nradov 14 hours ago [-]
The latest episode of Rick Rubin's Tetragrammaton podcast has an interview with Eric Roth who adapted the screenplay for Rendezvous with Rama.
>as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Others have noted that a faithful adaptation would have been a snooze-fest and inconsistent at best. There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.
>Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it
It's being helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the guy who did Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and the new Dune movies. If anyone can do a good job with it, he can.
>For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts,
Don't forget Villeneuve's "Arrival".
MBCook 10 hours ago [-]
> There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.
Yeah. The idea of the genetic dynasty with brothers Dawn/Day/Dusk, as well as how Demerzel fits in has been pretty great, and none of that was in the novels.
poisonarena 15 hours ago [-]
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.
"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.
atombender 13 hours ago [-]
Blindsight (and the excellent sequel, Echopraxia) is indeed great.
Solaris by Lem is perhaps the one above all. Lem wrote several of these "inscrutable alien first contact" novels: His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasco, and Eden are basically all variations on this theme, each one unique and highlighting a different aspect of humans' inability to understand the universe. The last three are a little dated now, but still enjoyable to read. HMV is rather dry, a Borgesian essay on an investigation into an alien signal, with lots of references to fictional scientific papers. (Len also wrote two collections of very Borgesian essays that are basically reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. They're interesting and funny, but I wouldn't put them among his most entertaining work.)
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also a masterpiece. They also have a few stories about unseen aliens manipulating the history of humanity by placing traps or transforming humans into infiltrators. The Max Kammerer books (e.g. Beetle in the Anthill) involve this storyline and are very good, probably not well known today.
I tried Tchaikovsky (both Children of Time and Shroud) and found him to be completely unengaging as a writer. Just really dull writing and flat characters. Watts and Reynolds are much better writers. Watts in particular can really pack a punch.
SAI_Peregrinus 14 hours ago [-]
Stanisław Lem's Solaris belongs in such a list IMO.
cal_dent 14 hours ago [-]
the comment on the blog recommending "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is also an excellent shout. One of the more original titles I've read in recent years that gives that feeling
kryptn 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
For Peter Watts - Echopraxia is just as wonderful as Blindsight, highly recommend.
abraxas 15 hours ago [-]
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.
Pepe1vo 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
To each their own. I did not expect the ending and found it quite satisfying.
gbourne 15 hours ago [-]
Children of Time was excellent, so thank for this recommendation.
oniony 15 hours ago [-]
I enjoyed Children of Time and also A Fire Upon the Deep, if you're looking for more recommendations.
jayGlow 15 hours ago [-]
the fourth book in that series comes out later this week if you haven't been keeping up with him
Pepe1vo 15 hours ago [-]
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
shagie 15 hours ago [-]
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).
stoneman24 15 hours ago [-]
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”
jacquesm 13 hours ago [-]
Agreed, the first one is a masterpiece and every sequel feels like a step down. It's a real pity because we do need more good SF writers, there are already too few of them.
ternus 15 hours ago [-]
A mere month after Pretenders to the Throne of God. You have to admire his output.
cyphertruck 15 hours ago [-]
I just read a series of his books involving "unspace" so nice to see a recommendation. Will check out Shroud.
microflash 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, The Architects books were pretty great but they had very classic soap opera kind of vibe than hardcore science fiction. I did enjoy them nonetheless.
UltraSane 15 hours ago [-]
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.
oniony 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
I too got bored, as you said the book did not seem to go anywhere.
garciasn 14 hours ago [-]
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-ended interpretations!”
rbanffy 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
brcmthrowaway 15 hours ago [-]
Same with Stranger in a Strange Land
jerf 13 hours ago [-]
From a 2026 perspective I couldn't possibly have had as a teenager in the 1990s, it kind of feels like a well-polished, extended SCP story.
As I can in 2026 gorge myself on "mysterious things doing mysterious tasks mysteriously", now an entire sub-genre of its own, I'm pretty sure the impact if I read it for the first time today would be somewhat muted by comparison.
I am also reminded of the J. J. Abrams "mystery box storytelling" technique. Rendevous with Rama was perhaps one of my first encounters with the technique, so I have fond memories of it. But in 2026 I find myself tired of the "woo woo there's a mystery and we're not going to tell you what it is" because in the end, all mystery boxes are fundamentally the same, and I've seen enough of the mystery box. It has its place in history but if a random person who has never read sci-fi of this era wanted a recommendation to start with, this would be way, way down on my list, unless you explicitly want to read things significant to the genre.
But as I've tried to make clear by my repeated references to the present time, that's my 2026 review. For the time it was a fine book.
cyphertruck 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
The biggest danger in giving Rama to Villeneuve is the studios deciding to make the sequels as well.
sumedh 2 hours ago [-]
If any filmmaker is reading instead of waiting for the film to be made, maybe you should do it with the help of AI.
arionmiles 15 hours ago [-]
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.
yaman12 15 hours ago [-]
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.
marsten 6 hours ago [-]
What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish.
There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more realistic possibility is that AI is a fundamentally different type of intelligence that may never be fully human-like.
Vermin2000 16 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
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.
hermitcrab 14 hours ago [-]
Clarke was widely believed to be gay/bisexual when it was illegal in the UK. Perhaps he was overcompensating?
przemelek 14 hours ago [-]
To be honest I had always a lot of thoughts about this how Rama would be filled with air.... I mean it spins, but how Ramas filled it with air? Central Sea was one of sources, but water wasn't possible there before whole Rama being filled with air. So my thinking was always, air enters in the center, goes in all directions, hits surface which is 750 km/h... so ~40% of speed of molecules... how much it "slows down" Rama? Would there be needed some additional force to spin it? How long it would take to "calm down", and build gradient of oxygen/air in Rama...
Always was thinking about writting some simulation for it, but it was always "someday" ;-)
pndy 4 hours ago [-]
Just assume that Ramans were "złote rączki" and everything simply clicks together. I mean, if they were capable to build such ships in the first place, it wouldn't be (and wasn't) a problem to fill these with capable environmental control systems and suitable drive.
In the other books characters are put into hibernation so they could travel at high speeds. Perhaps atmosphere was removed and only minimal breathing mixture was provided for the passengers.
By the way, I think SciFun had an episode on this channel about O'Neill cylinder
TomatoCo 14 hours ago [-]
Conservation of angular momentum. Once everything is in it, and it's spun up, it won't stop.
wsowens 15 hours ago [-]
Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favorites as a teenager, hopefully the film adaptation does it justice.
If you want to listen to the audiobook Rendevous with Rama, I strongly recommend against the version as narrated by Peter Ganim. One of the worst narrators. His pacing is so bad it sounds like he is inserting periods into the middle of sentences. By the end his cadence improves, but it seriously made me stop listening to the story multiple times because of the poor narration.
Which is a shame, because the story is great. The "aha"! moment the ending gives is a huge rush.
ggm-at-algebras 15 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 15 hours ago [-]
2010 is also good. The movie is also competent, but it could never fill the shoes 2001 left.
twoodfin 14 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 5 hours ago [-]
Sean Bean meme saying “one does not simply make a sequel to 2001”.
I would completely redo the sets and get rid of CRTs everywhere, add understandable displays in Russian to the Leonov, and re-add the 1:1 flat displays to the Discovery. Also, remove the keyboards, which weren’t there in 2001.
Analemma_ 15 hours ago [-]
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.
metaphor 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ggm-at-algebras 15 hours ago [-]
It would seem passing strange that Gentry Lee came up with all the awful bits and the consulting oversight didn't.
BeetleB 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
By the same time he did The Hammer of God, which is great.
rbanffy 15 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 12 hours ago [-]
The terrible bits were all stuff that Clarke never wrote in any of his solo novels.
XorNot 15 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 15 hours ago [-]
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".
zem 15 hours ago [-]
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."
qingcharles 15 hours ago [-]
All I remember from 3001 was a bit about velociraptors being used as gardeners and babysitters.
ggm-at-algebras 15 hours ago [-]
Nothing in this thread makes me feel I should change my mind but de gustibus and all that.
acheron 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
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.
pndy 3 hours ago [-]
IIRC they were working together at the same time. The "2001" book set action around Saturn's Iapetus moon and so the screen initially was meant to follow it. But since it was impossible to create convincing planetary rings at that time, action switches to Jupiter's Europa. And so all other Odyssey books were set there as well.
14 hours ago [-]
hombre_fatal 15 hours ago [-]
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.
shagie 14 hours ago [-]
Some of my early renderings Renderman (high school), Povray (college), and Art ( https://www.abemegahed.com/software/ - at the very end) were trying to visualize the scale of Rama and Ringworld.
The scale of it was... well... astronomical.
jacquesm 13 hours ago [-]
Some of the ringworld covers were quite good.
shagie 13 hours ago [-]
One of the things that I recall from that (and written about elsewhere... though I don't recall where) is that the shadows of the shadow squares, when viewed from the surface all subtend the same angle on the Arc of Heaven.
jacquesm 13 hours ago [-]
Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most evocative books I've read by Clarke. I often think back of it in visuals and then have to remind myself I read a book, I have not seen a movie.
This does not improve.
mattschaller 15 hours ago [-]
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.
asmodeuslucifer 13 hours ago [-]
Like celebrity deaths, news about RwR comes in threes.
refulgentis 14 hours ago [-]
Really cool writeup, really appreciated it -
Only thing that my hangry self took issue with -
"When I first read this as a teenager, I came away with a huge sense of wonder... When I re-read it many years later as an adult, I didn’t quite get that same sense of wonder, but maybe that’s because I’m more jaded now.
Wonder seems to have fallen out of favor with sci-fi writers."
Has it? Approaching it de novo, it sounds much more likely that you are immune to wonder - i.e. apply Occam's Razor to: A) I don't get wonder from this book that used to give me wonder B) I don't get wonder from recent SciFi books.
Then there's the second thing, ignoring Occam's Razor: "Recent SciFi books don't have wonder" doesn't follow from A and/or B, it's another premise that could justify B.
FWIW I feel the same way re: wonder getting older. My excuse is we've just seen too much training data, i.e. some things don't have an explanation and that's fine and there's nowhere to go with it.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 15 hours ago [-]
This reminded me that they made a point-and-click game of Rama. I remember enjoying it.
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
readthenotes1 14 hours ago [-]
"Clarke himself was gay"
Maybe it no longer needs to be said in this day and age, but Clarke was accused, credibly, of being a pedophile (or, to diminish it with a technicality, hebephile).
It is not quite as abhorrent/chilling as the also credible accusations against Marion Zimmer Bradley--but only because she was teamed up with a Jeffrey Epstein like character.
selcuka 14 hours ago [-]
> Clarke was accused, credibly, of being a pedophile
Genuinely curious, where does the credibility come from? As far as I can remember it turned out to be an outright slander by a tabloid paper.
No idea if he was as much of an insufferable egomaniac as that article makes out.
Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing. Hopefully we are a bit more enlightened now.
MBCook 9 hours ago [-]
> Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing.
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.
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.
I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain
Also they seemed to have a weird obsession about who was going to have sex with who to minimise inbreeding in the next generation. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by not remembering so well, but I recall that seeming pretty weirdly prominent.
Sounds like Tolstoy…
I admit it's been a long time since I read them (maybe 20 years), but I certainly don't remember anything quite like this. I remember it more like the other poster here said: they basically said everyone was corrupt. In a nutshell, Rama comes back to Earth with instructions that a bunch of humans need to come aboard to live out their lives there. But instead of sending their best, some parts of Earth send their worst: criminals and such. So pretty quickly there's several different "cities", with one of them basically run by some crime boss. One of the main characters' daughters gets involved with the crime boss somehow and murders him before killing herself, as payback for killing her father. Later, the human habitat goes to war with the aliens in one of the other habitats, because the humans had broken through to their side and invaded them for some reason I forget. There was even one plot point that the father had hacked into the ship's environmental controls because the humans insisted on having wood-burning fireplaces, even though this messed with the environmental control systems. Instead of just not burning fires, the basically forced him to change the system to accommodate their fireplaces.
But I don't remember any sex slaves. Maybe I forgot that part.
Unlike others in this comments tree, I liked the other books. These go against the typical space exploration journey where you have humans on their ship surrounded by technology they're familiar with and on which they can fully rely. Here, characters are uncertain of their future - they don't know where they're going, have to adapt to the surroundings, discover the unknown and face downsides of human beings. There's none of that familiar splendor of "going boldly where no man has gone before" or heroic actions, great fights in the outer space. Lee's contribution shows us as small, even unsuited to live among others - here and there.
On the other hand, I'm not fond of his other books where he tried to continue this universe: "Bright Messengers" and "Double Full Moon Night". These felt like distilled, fast-tracked version of "Rama" with more religious overtones because of two characters included.
---
Clarke's own books and these which he co-wrote with other authors have potential for adaptations for the big and small screen. "Rama" series taken by good writers and directors could become a new hit comparable to "Lost" show - which if you stretch some things, feels somehow similar.
Yeah, really the original Rama book was it - just image how sequels to the Matrix movie would look like, those could have been even worse!
Meanwhile, many books I read nowadays on kindle routinely have 8 books in a series.
I wonder what makes this happen? Is it that self-publishing that just spits things out with less friction? Less editing and/or second guessing? AI helping? Expectations?
I didn't go in with the expectation that they'd be just like Rendezvous with Rama.
I felt similar about the recent authorized sequel to Andromeda Strain.
It didn’t feel like the same universe to me. More like someone was told the book flap description of the first book and a few character names and just wrote from there.
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).
Denis Villeneuve (Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, Prisoners, etc) is set to direct and is writing the script as well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#Film
Though it may be a little while since he first has to release adaptation of Dune Messiah, and a Bond film is probably next:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve#Upcoming_proj...
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.
The Phillip Glass soundtrack particularly elevates it too.
It would be surely minced thru to fit all the standard of the industry - and that's the fear I'm having while craving for screen adaptations of books today.
Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.
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.
https://www.tetragrammaton.com/content/eric-roth
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Others have noted that a faithful adaptation would have been a snooze-fest and inconsistent at best. There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.
>Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it
It's being helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the guy who did Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and the new Dune movies. If anyone can do a good job with it, he can.
>For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts,
Don't forget Villeneuve's "Arrival".
Yeah. The idea of the genetic dynasty with brothers Dawn/Day/Dusk, as well as how Demerzel fits in has been pretty great, and none of that was in the novels.
https://youtu.be/gRivMEEZZE8?si=S1ZCDAg9Sl37jwoX full album
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.
Solaris by Lem is perhaps the one above all. Lem wrote several of these "inscrutable alien first contact" novels: His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasco, and Eden are basically all variations on this theme, each one unique and highlighting a different aspect of humans' inability to understand the universe. The last three are a little dated now, but still enjoyable to read. HMV is rather dry, a Borgesian essay on an investigation into an alien signal, with lots of references to fictional scientific papers. (Len also wrote two collections of very Borgesian essays that are basically reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. They're interesting and funny, but I wouldn't put them among his most entertaining work.)
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also a masterpiece. They also have a few stories about unseen aliens manipulating the history of humanity by placing traps or transforming humans into infiltrators. The Max Kammerer books (e.g. Beetle in the Anthill) involve this storyline and are very good, probably not well known today.
I tried Tchaikovsky (both Children of Time and Shroud) and found him to be completely unengaging as a writer. Just really dull writing and flat characters. Watts and Reynolds are much better writers. Watts in particular can really pack a punch.
Shroud is great, easy recommendation. Another of Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay, also great, also very alien.
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).
Don’t normally buy a hard cover or kindle (I like the paperback) but I may do that for book 4 “Children of Strife”
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.
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-ended interpretations!”
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.
As I can in 2026 gorge myself on "mysterious things doing mysterious tasks mysteriously", now an entire sub-genre of its own, I'm pretty sure the impact if I read it for the first time today would be somewhat muted by comparison.
I am also reminded of the J. J. Abrams "mystery box storytelling" technique. Rendevous with Rama was perhaps one of my first encounters with the technique, so I have fond memories of it. But in 2026 I find myself tired of the "woo woo there's a mystery and we're not going to tell you what it is" because in the end, all mystery boxes are fundamentally the same, and I've seen enough of the mystery box. It has its place in history but if a random person who has never read sci-fi of this era wanted a recommendation to start with, this would be way, way down on my list, unless you explicitly want to read things significant to the genre.
But as I've tried to make clear by my repeated references to the present time, that's my 2026 review. For the time it was a fine book.
Let's hope it happens soon... finally.
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.
There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more realistic possibility is that AI is a fundamentally different type of intelligence that may never be fully human-like.
Always was thinking about writting some simulation for it, but it was always "someday" ;-)
In the other books characters are put into hibernation so they could travel at high speeds. Perhaps atmosphere was removed and only minimal breathing mixture was provided for the passengers.
By the way, I think SciFun had an episode on this channel about O'Neill cylinder
Which is a shame, because the story is great. The "aha"! moment the ending gives is a huge rush.
The same could be said of 2001.
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.
I would completely redo the sets and get rid of CRTs everywhere, add understandable displays in Russian to the Leonov, and re-add the 1:1 flat displays to the Discovery. Also, remove the keyboards, which weren’t there in 2001.
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.
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.
Although it seemed implausible in the setting that humanity wasn't immortal given some of the technology.
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".
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."
> 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.
I think Kubrick was very much the dominant force in the partnership, but they did work quite closely together.
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.
The scale of it was... well... astronomical.
This does not improve.
Only thing that my hangry self took issue with -
"When I first read this as a teenager, I came away with a huge sense of wonder... When I re-read it many years later as an adult, I didn’t quite get that same sense of wonder, but maybe that’s because I’m more jaded now.
Wonder seems to have fallen out of favor with sci-fi writers."
Has it? Approaching it de novo, it sounds much more likely that you are immune to wonder - i.e. apply Occam's Razor to: A) I don't get wonder from this book that used to give me wonder B) I don't get wonder from recent SciFi books.
Then there's the second thing, ignoring Occam's Razor: "Recent SciFi books don't have wonder" doesn't follow from A and/or B, it's another premise that could justify B.
FWIW I feel the same way re: wonder getting older. My excuse is we've just seen too much training data, i.e. some things don't have an explanation and that's fine and there's nowhere to go with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game)
Inverted World by Christopher Priest
Maybe it no longer needs to be said in this day and age, but Clarke was accused, credibly, of being a pedophile (or, to diminish it with a technicality, hebephile).
It is not quite as abhorrent/chilling as the also credible accusations against Marion Zimmer Bradley--but only because she was teamed up with a Jeffrey Epstein like character.
Genuinely curious, where does the credibility come from? As far as I can remember it turned out to be an outright slander by a tabloid paper.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/sep/12/sciencefiction...
No idea if he was as much of an insufferable egomaniac as that article makes out.
Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing. Hopefully we are a bit more enlightened now.
Yeah that’s still a thing, unfortunately.