Rendezvous with Rama

A fifty-kilometre cylinder enters the solar system on a hyperbolic orbit, a crew is scrambled to intercept it before it swings past the Sun and leaves, and the entire novel is the survey: go inside, map it, work out what the machinery is for, and accept that nobody is going to explain it to you. It swept the Hugo, the Nebula and the Campbell. There is almost no interpersonal plot, which is exactly why infrastructure people like it — it is a novel about reverse-engineering an undocumented system under a hard deadline.

Context: On the a16z Infra Reading List under Clarke, alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountains of Paradise — the three the team picks out of a very large bibliography.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Arthur C. Clarke — the author.
• Engineering — the book is a survey report with a plot; the interest is all in the artefact’s design.
• 2001 — A Space Odyssey — the same premise of an artefact that refuses to explain itself, handled differently.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.
• a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.