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Originally Posted by Maryjane Ya it was allot of years since I read the first book of Rama but it made an impression in my mind and I never forgot it, It was an awsome starship built by another inteligent race. It was a huge cylindrycal ship with a complete eko system vegitation water and clouds on the inside of the walls of the hull with an artificial sun at zero gravity at the center of the ship but there was no sign of who the previous owners were or what had happened to them. If I remember corectly the eko system in the ship didn't start coming to life until it entered our solar system, automatically kicking in the on switch. I think it was designed to shut down in interstelar space while all life in the eko system went dormant or in stasis. I think it was the second book about Rama, unless I'm mystaken with another book I read with a similar ship, in this Rama there were people living in it, many genertaitons of earth people had lived in it and they thought the inside of the ship was their world, the only world there was. After all those genrations they had lost the knowledge and memory of their original purpose except for a legend of a promissed land. They were not aware they were inside a star ship on a colision course with a star. They were living in the life style of the early Amarican colonial days. I think it was one of the males and his mate found an entrance to an ancient passageway that eventually led them to one of many control rooms in the ship and they discovered they were indeed in a starship traveleling through an infinite voide of blackness dotted with tiny bright lights and one ahead of them much biger and brighter then the rest was the star they were on a colision course with. Oh what to do they didn't understand any of the control panels and what their functions were and I'll leave it there. |
Erm, no. You're describing Gene Wolfe's
The Book of the Long Sun. They are somewhat similar though.
Rendezvous with Rama (1973) is set in 2130 and chronicles what happens when a 50km-long alien cylinder enters the Solar system. A transport ship called
Endeavour rendezvouses with Rama and its crew, who are not trained for this kind of work, explore the cavernous interior. They only have a few weeks before they have to leave as Rama's course takes it dangerously close to the Sun. There are some good subplots about religious fanatics who want to destroy Rama as well. At the end of the book virtually none of the mysteries about Rama have been answered, which is kind of the point.
The Rama Cycle is the sequel to
Rendezvous with Rama and is a trilogy. Interestingly, it has been called 'a' sequel to
Rendezvous and seems to operate on the same principle that Clarke applies to the Odyssey books, namely that this is a version of what happens next, possibly taking place in a parallel universe. This trilogy was plotted by Clarke and Lee but the actual writing was done by Gentry Lee, with Clarke doing a couple of editing passes on it (IIRC).
Rama II (1989) picks up the story in 2200 after a second Rama ship has been discovered years away from the Solar system, allowing a dedicated science mission to explore the ship to be put together. The book is much more character-driven than
Rendezvous and there are thriller elements as well. The book has a cliffhanger ending. It is followed by
The Garden of Rama (1991) and
Rama Revealed (1993).
Gentry Lee later also wrote three novels by himself set in the same timeline as
The Rama Cycle:
Bright Messengers,
Double Full Moon Night and
Tranquillity Wars. These have not been published in the UK.
A movie version of
Rendezvous with Rama has been in development for over five years. It will be directed by David Fincher (
Alien 3,
Se7en) and will star Morgan Freeman as the captain of the
Endeavour. Apparently Fincher feels that CGI technology is not yet up to the level required to capture his vision, but hopes to get round to the film in the next few years.
Rendezvous with Rama holds two distinctions. It is the only novel ever to win all three of the Big Three SF Awards (the Nebula, Hugo and John W. Campbell Awards) and was apparently the first-ever Western novel to be published in the Soviet Union without extensive editing by the Soviet censors.