Rendezvous with Rama : the story

This science fiction novel has been written by Arthur C. Clarke (who worked with Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey) in 1973.

One day, some unknown flying object – astronomers call it Rama - comes into the solar system. At the beginning, it seems to be a new comet, but its moves are surprising. Then it appears that this unknown object is not natural, because it is perfectly cylindrical. So solar survey vessel Endeavour, the nearest spaceship, is missionned to go to the comet and to explore it. But the commander Norton thinks that there can be no life anymore, because of the time Rama had to travel to come into sollar system : they should have exhausted all ressources they had at beginning : beeing big for a built object, Rama was still to small to harbor life for millions of years.

Then, the spaceship lands on the huge cylinder, and spacecrews begin to explore it – or more precisely, the inside of it, because it appears that it isn't full. At the beginning, they have to use light and try to explore some part of this small world, and they find nothing as a trace of life, as if Rama was not a dead world but had never been a living one. Than, when the orbit of Rama is nearer from the Sun, three lightning tubes enlight it. The crews are surprised, but it helps them to better understand Rama, because they can see it. Nevertheless, it seems also odd to them that there is no sky (they are inside a cylinder, and the rotation creates a fake gravitation). Moreover, the world seems triply replicated : each thing appears three times.

At the same time, there are some political issues happening. The solar system is partialy colonised, and the representants of inhabited planets are meeting together with scientists into an especially created committee, called Raman Committee, to understand what happens and decide what to do if they have to. When they understand it is from an alien world, they become less quiet and try to understand why it is coming into the sollar system. There is also some new version of the christianism, called the Fifth Church of Christ, which assumes that Jesus Christ was a visitor from space who came to explain that the redemption was coming from the sky. So some of them believe that Rama is some kind of Noah's arch coming to save those who deserve it.

Then, the spacecrews discover robots acting on Rama. They seem to be animals, but they are made from metal. Some looks like carbs with six feet, other like big spider with three feet. The crews doesn't understand what happens, but they see only the crabs, then only the spiders. Scientists of the Rama Committee understand that the robots were created just some time ago, and they think that Rama contains a factory building new creatures, first simple and previsible ones that take care of Rama, and then, later, to build new beeings like the creators of Rama themselves. After a while, they are unexplained electromagnetic phenomenons and Rama changes its orbit.

It makes the Hermians – the inhabitants of Mercury – fear that something happen near from their planet. So they decide to destroy Rama. They build a missile in secret, and then they let some time for the crews to leave the tiny world. But one of them is a Cosmo-Christer, so he doesn't want it to be destroyed : he goes on the missile, and desactivate it before the Hermians can even know it.

Then the crews have to leave Rama, because it is coming to close of the sun. During their return onto the inhabited moon, they see that the cylinder leaves the solar system, and they understand that it had nothing to do with human race.