Arthur C. Clarke’s "Rendezvous with Rama," a summary

This book is a recognized benchmark in research fiction about encounters with extraterrestrial intelligence. Humanity encounters a massive artificial object, whose mysterious creators completely ignore earthlings and pursue their own agendas. Dialogue between cultures is impossible. The author conceived the idea in the late 1960s thanks to astronomical calculations, and completed the manuscript in 1972, publishing the finished work as a book in the summer of 1973.

The novel garnered major genre awards. In 1973, it won the prestigious Nebula Award, and in 1974, it won three awards: the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. The original text inaugurated the "Rama" series, which later included "Rama II," "Rama’s Garden," and "Rama Revealed." The first volume remained the best.

An uninvited guest from the depths of the Galaxy

A catastrophic meteorite impact in Italy in 2077 gave birth to the Space Patrol. Half a century later, the patrol’s sensitive radars detected a fast-moving celestial body of an unusual forty-kilometer diameter beyond the distant orbit of Jupiter.

The object was named Rama. The celestial visitor moved along an open hyperbolic trajectory through the Solar System at colossal speed, completing a full rotation around its own longitudinal axis in just four minutes without the slightest sign of gravitational deceleration. The automated probe "Sita" transmitted sensational images to Earth of a perfect, hollow cylinder fifty kilometers long with completely flat ends. The colossal structure turned out to be an artificial engineering feat of an unknown stellar civilization.

The only manned vessel capable of intercepting the alien before perihelion passage was the research vessel Endeavour, commanded by the experienced Captain William Norton. The crew made a precise landing precisely at the center of the alien giant’s rotating north pole. Entry airlocks were discovered there. Commander Norton, along with life support specialist Karl Mercer, manually turned the ribbed emergency drive wheel, opening a three-stage transfer tunnel through the half-kilometer-thick armor into the dark core of the alien world.

Inside a hollow cylinder

A magnesium rocket, launched into the centuries-old darkness, illuminated the vast interior of a colossal cylinder. The spectacle stunned the cosmonauts with its magnitude. A closed, sixteen-kilometer-wide basin opened up before the explorers, featuring a concave plain encircled by a ring of frozen dark sea, containing an island of factory buildings, provisionally named New York on Earth, and six blocks of solid metal structures. Three massive emergency stairways, with intermediate ring-shaped rest areas, descended from the central polar platform to the plain. Karl Mercer and two officers successfully tested the descent.

The artificial centrifugal gravity gradually increased here as people moved further away from the central polar axis. A stable weight appeared below. A deep, straight furrow in the plain surprised the explorers with its smooth, mirror-like bottom, evoking in Captain Norton a vivid memory of a neat English railway cutting from his distant student days on an old, smoky steam locomotive. Visible traces of biological activity or structural wear were completely absent from the alien metal.

Awakening of the artificial world

Rama’s rapid and inexorable approach to the Sun triggered a profound thermal reaction, predicted in advance by Dr. Carlisle Perera, a member of the Special Lunar Committee. Six linear suns flared. The cylindrical sea suddenly cracked its icy shell from below with a deafening roar of millions of cracked, transparent boulders, generating fierce trade winds that swirled the rising, moist air into a perfect cloud tunnel along the central axis of the rotating world. Within two days, the enclosed marine organic suspension saturated the local atmosphere with pure oxygen thanks to accelerated photosynthesis. A swift, artificial spring had arrived.

Sergeant Ruby Barnes led the maiden voyage of the homemade motor raft, the Resolution, to a mysterious island metropolis. The tall towers of Raman’s New York turned out to be a colossal, automated chemical plant with absolute threefold symmetry, devoid of conventional living quarters, standard doors, and observation windows. The entire island served as a vacant factory for the materialization of service mechanisms. The builders remained completely silent.

Flight over the abyss

Young Lieutenant James Pack secretly smuggled aboard a reconnaissance ship an ultralight, powered aircraft called the "Dragonfly," ideally suited for maneuvering in low gravity. The daring pilot risked a solo flight across the Cylindrical Sea along the central, weightless axis. The South Pole was astonishing with its cyclopean peaks. A six-pronged crown of minor spurs surrounded a colossal five-kilometer-long central horn, where, under the influence of a growing magnetic field, gigantic electrical discharges suddenly erupted, generating a powerful ionized wind and a devastating impact on the lightweight aircraft. A broken, fragile wing doomed the gliding craft to an inevitable plunge deep into the Southern Hemisphere.

James miraculously survived on a strange mosaic plain, neatly divided into kilometer-long sectors with all sorts of surfaces, fences, and experimental fields. A six-legged shelled crab indifferently crushed the wreckage of the Dragonfly and dumped it into a deep shaft. The mechanism ignored the man. Moving on foot among the artificial enclosures, the lieutenant discovered a solitary, strange flower with blue tubular petals, breaking through the protective synthetic film. He plucked it with excruciating effort to save the scientific specimen. The withering plant immediately retracted the remains of its damaged stem back into the soil.

Rescue required desperate audacity. According to Dr. Perera’s precise calculations, the high drag of dense air in the local weak gravity limited a person’s terminal fall speed to a perfectly safe ninety kilometers per hour. James bravely jumped from the five-hundred-meter southern cliff, using his stretched shirt to stabilize his flight vertically. The Resolution raft picked him up. A sudden seismic shock rocked the Cylindrical Sea into a gigantic circular wave, which the boat happily navigated over the deep water, witnessing the death throes of the nine-rayed marine biota, quickly dismantled by specialized crustacean orderlies into basic parts.

Threat from Mercury

The interior of the colossal cylinder was filled with hundreds of diverse biota.

Three-legged, ultra-fast spiders methodically inspected the camp’s Earth-based equipment, cleaners diligently polished the light strips, and heavy bulldozers continuously cleared the plain. Dr. Ernst dissected the dead specimen. The autopsy revealed the complete absence of a digestive or respiratory system: exactly four-fifths of the astonishing creature’s body was occupied by a powerful organic battery, powering its muscles and proving the artificial nature of these specialized biological machines. The peaceful scientific study of the alien was abruptly interrupted by an extremely secret encrypted message from the commander-in-chief of the Earth space fleet. The Mercury government had become aggressive.

Fearing the imminent capture of near-solar space by an unknown, superior force, the Mercurians secretly launched a high-speed, automatic projectile with a colossal thermonuclear charge toward Rama. Communications officer Boris Rodrigo volunteered to prevent the impending barbaric destruction of the wonder. Piloting a lightweight space scooter at maximum thrust, the brave cosmonaut approached the rocket, used ordinary wire cutters to cut all the charge control cables right under the lenses of the Mercurian television cameras, and deflected the mine with a thrust boost. The danger was completely eliminated.

Farewell to the Space Ark

Before the final, inevitable evacuation, Captain Norton and three of his faithful companions used a laser cutter to burn through the solid wall of a building in London. A glass castle opened inside. Hundreds of transparent columns held 3D holographic templates of all sorts of instruments, vessels, technical devices, and a spacesuit for an upright, three-armed creature approximately two and a half meters tall, revealing the anatomy of the true owners of the grand starship. Suddenly, the main linear suns went out, giving way to lights pulsating alarmingly across the plain. A strange warning siren sounded.

All the mechanical inhabitants of both hemispheres rushed together toward the Cylindrical Sea and leaped from the coastal cliffs, vanishing without a trace in the water under the jaws of marine medics. With their last strength, the humans climbed the steep, endless steps to the airlocks. The Endeavour abandoned the alien just in time. The unsupported gravity drive, ignited, caused the starry sky to spin around the research vessel, and the giant ship itself rushed toward the Sun, enveloping its hull in an impenetrable, mirrored cocoon half a million kilometers from the photosphere. The stellar wanderer absorbed the colossal plasma energy of the corona and abruptly changed course toward the Magellanic Clouds. Humanity remained unnoticed.

Captain Norton sadly reflected on the grandeur of the ark that had departed for distant galaxies on board. The mystery remained forever unsolved. On distant Earth, Doctor Carlisle Perera awoke from a restless sleep with the sudden realization of a fundamental engineering principle of the alien civilization: the Ramans do absolutely everything three times.