"The human race has to live with its conscience. Whatever the Hermians argue, survival is not everything."
-Rendezvous with Rama

I’m biased towards space novels. Reading about space travel and stars and planets and contemplating the huge vastness and emptiness always fills me with a sense of indescribable wonder, bliss, and humility.

Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is a space poetry. It starts with a simple premise of an alien object (Rama) suddenly appearing in the solar system and humans venturing out to explore it. The entirety of the book is a sneak peek into Arthur Clarke’s fantastic imagination.

The book is naive in a lot of ways. The characters are superficial with each having at most one or two driving traits, there are hardly any deep questions or areas explored, there is very little human conflict, everyone is respectful of everyone else, everyone behaves completely rationally within their constraints and limitations, most difficult situations resolve themselves without much struggle. This might as well have been a novel about an experiment running inside a well-organized lab where everyone takes all the necessary precautions and follows all the necessary protocol. It is more of a long short-story than a novel.

On the other hand, once you’ve gotten rid of all these extraneous features, all that’s left is Clarke’s incredible dream of what an alien object could look like on the inside. There is not a single mundane thing about the alien world he creates. The book is not unlike a spectacular painting made using words, colorful and dazzling, like those old sci-fi book covers, inspiring unadulterated awe and wonder.

The best feature of this book, even more startling than its imaginativeness, is its storytelling. A book in which characters are unimportant and human interactions are perfunctory and in which the protagonist is an object floating in space, by default makes for a very drab read. But with just the right amount of revealing and just the right mishaps and shattering of plans Clarke gives life to this inanimate story. I read the last few pages unblinking, fixated to my kindle, full of intense anticipation, trying to predict what’s going to happen to Rama and how many of its secrets will finally be revealed, and I wasn’t disappointed.