Sunday, December 02, 2012

Rashmi bookmarks “Rendezvous with Rama”


The tragic meteor impact of 2077… gigantic cameras, probes and satellites launched into orbit… that momentous event of 2131 when an asteroid 40 kilometres across and a day lasting four minutes came hurtling towards the sun… humankind’s first ever contact with an alien civilization - and all in the first 20 pages! This is the reason I call Arthur C. Clarke the pioneer of science fiction, and consider him one of my all-time favourites.

Rendezvous with Rama is the story of survey ship Endeavour and its mission to gather as much information as possible in this first extra terrestrial contact before Rama touches perihelion and starts on its way back.

The best thing I liked about this book - which in fact is the best thing I like about Arthur C. Clarke - is that I was immediately taken to a world way into the future without any slow or pointless preamble! And that started with the very title of the book - having gone through Greek and Roman legends to name newly discovered objects in Space, scientists in this future date have now turned to Hindu mythology (Rama being the name of the main protagonist of the epic Ramayana). And right away the tone is set - yes, in the future, scientists would have run out of the names that are common today!

The story starts with people of different planets sitting in conference, discussing an asteroid that came from a million light years away. As we follow Commander Bill Norton and his team into the heart of Rama, we quite literally leave our present day Earth behind. This is the world where monkeys, the ‘superchimps’, do chores as housekeeping, elementary cooking, tool carrying and dozens of routine jobs, so that humans can be free to do human work (as all progress should really aim for). This is the world where a ballpoint pen is a prized possession of a few collectors. This is the world where Mercury, which by the way has cities like Inferno and Port Lucifer, is an inhabited planet. This is the world where religions like ‘Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut’ exist, the main tenet of which is that Jesus Christ was a visitor from space.

Clarke takes us out of our comfort zone to enter a totally alien world. When Commander Norton is at Rama’s central axis: a hollow cylinder of indefinite length, he tries to assign words like crater, wall and sky to his surroundings, but immediately forces the ‘false impression’ out of his head with the realization that “he must discard the instincts both of earth and of space, and re-orientate himself to a new system of coordinates.” In the face of proof that life exists outside our solar system, that’s exactly what we also must do. I have to say; there were moments when, like the space travellers, I also experienced a disturbing sense of vertigo. When you are in endless - literally endless - space, with no colours of blue sky to denote ‘above’ or green grass to denote ‘below’, and not even the pull of gravity to tell your brain that that is ‘down’, so the opposite is ‘up’, what a sense of disorientation that would lead to. To the writer’s credit, this is exactly how I envision outer space and alien worlds to be - I do not expect them to follow Earth’s laws of physics. Even in the one scene where Rama seems to be following Earth’s creation, and moves from the ice age, to water and oxygen formation, to the making of planktons… it all takes mere hours and days - not 375 million years!

Jimmy Pak’s flight on his low gravity skybike, to the southern end of Rama, takes the story to an exciting new phase - from an endless world of ‘cities’ with ‘buildings’ and ‘streets’ (significantly built in threes) and a sea, to a weird world with cones emitting strange magnetic fields, crab-like robots and even alien flora!

What really took the story to a whole new level for me was the fact that in every step of the adventure there is such a sense of waiting… but for what, we don’t know! As the Endeavour team walks along the endless stairways and plains of Rama, the one thing they are all subdued by is the almost palpable silence. “Every footstep, every word, vanished instantly into the unreverberant void”. But there is also the constant sense that something is coming - a sense that is heightened with the intensified race against time as Rama’s outer hull changes from 270 degrees below, to molten lead as it races towards the sun.

Books like this are the reason why Science Fiction is my favourite genre. Anything can and does happen! And that is what should be at the core of all creative processes. It should not be bound by any possibilities or probabilities. There should be a constant sense of wonder and discovery and innovation!

No comments:

Post a Comment