Celestial Pit Stop

By R.Z. Sheppard

RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA

by ARTHUR C.CLARKE 303 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

As a science-fiction writer. Arthur C. Clarke neither exploits the psychology of guilt and punishment with apocalypses nor sees future man as clones of bronzed Ubermenschen surfing out of Peter Max cornucopias. Basically, Clarke extrapolates the latest scientific theory and hardware into a future where good and evil are controlled under standard temperature and pressure.

Yet this aeronautical engineer and specialist in communications satellites is not without his poetry. In Childhood's End (1953), the best of his nearly 20 novels and story collections, he pushed the theory of evolution toward a new creation myth, as humankind toddled -with some sadness and a certain lyric mysticism -out of its earthbound nursery toward a higher being. Clarke's best-known work is his collaboration with Director Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001, which viewers left not only humming bits of Richard Strauss but full of wry speculations. Did HAL, the onboard computer, rebel because of homosexual jealousy, or was he some kind of reverse Luddite who feared that the mission back to first causes would leave him metaphysically unemployed?

Rendezvous with Rama, also offers film makers enormous opportunities for awesome props. Its true protagonist is not a person at all but a huge artificial world that sails into the solar system in the year 2130. At that point in space/ time -to make that abominable locution perfectly clear -the solar system has been politically organized into a federation of planets inhabited by descendants of earth pioneers.

The mysterious UFO, named Rama by its puzzled observers, is a metallic cylinder more than 30 miles long and twelve across and weighing about ten trillion tons. With time running out and Rama's intentions unknown, decisions have to be made. The nearest humans to Rama are Commander Bill Norton and his crew aboard the spaceship Endeavour. They undertake a reconnaissance of Rama's innards, crawling about the spotless metal sky like flies on some behemoth's twitching flank.

Rama has its own weather, sea and balanced ecology. Its creatures are forms of organic machines that either benignly watch the visitors or drag off broken objects, thus keeping the landscape junk-free. But who built Rama and why remain a mystery, though the discovery of human-like artifacts encoded as 3-D blueprints in crystal columns suggests that Rama is some sort of vast ark in search of a new home. But in fact its only interest in the solar system is to tank up on the sun's hydrogen before rounding the next cosmic bend without so much as thank you. The probability that a vastly superior intelligence would be totally indifferent to man and his doings is indeed what Clarke is writing about. But the theme is a bit too thinly spread between those two familiar sci-fi constants, the speed of light and the indomitable molasses of human nature.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.