Rendezvous with Rama

In 2131 an object enters the solar system on a hyperbolic path. It is fifty kilometres long, twenty across, perfectly cylindrical, spinning, and made of something that reflects radar like polished metal. Astronomers name it Rama, and one ship, the Endeavour, is close enough to intercept before it swings round the sun and leaves.

What the crew find inside is a world turned inward: a cylindrical landscape wrapped around them, lit by six enormous strip windows, with a frozen sea running in a band round the middle and a city on the far shore. Nothing moves. Nothing answers. As Rama nears the sun it warms, the sea thaws and storms, and biological machines assemble themselves out of a chemical vat and begin performing tasks nobody can interpret.

That is the book. A crew explores a very large object carefully, measures things, argues about what they mean, nearly dies twice, and leaves. There is no contact, no conflict, and no explanation, and the withholding is entirely deliberate.

Clarke's characters are thin and he knows it. What he delivers instead is the purest example in the genre of awe produced by scale and detail: a stairway eight kilometres long, a cylindrical sea, weather generated by physics rather than plot.

There is a subplot in which a Mercurian colony decides Rama is a threat and launches a missile at it, and the man who has to go out and disarm it is the closest thing the book has to a hero.

Around two hundred and fifty pages, cool, clean and quick, with short chapters and no subplot that does not concern the object.

The ending frustrates a great many readers, since the crew leave knowing nothing and Rama takes no notice of them at any point. Best for readers who want the sensation of standing inside something enormous and unexplained, and who do not need it explained afterwards.