Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.
It’s so good that I can’t even find the words to tell you how good it is. So let me give you Clarke’s words, instead. Here are the opening paragraphs of the story, so you can decide for yourselves whether you want to buy this book and read it:
By the year 2130, the Mars-based radars were discovering new asteroids at the rate of a dozen a day. The SPACEGUARD computers automatically calculated their orbits and stored the information in their own enormous memories, so that every few months any interested astronomer could have a look at the accumulated statistics. They were now quite impressive.
It had taken more than 120 years to collect the first thousand asteroids, since the discovery of Ceres, largest of these tiny worlds, on the very first day of the nineteenth century. Hundreds had been found and lost and found again; they existed in such swarms that one exasperated astronomer had christened them “vermin of the skies.” He would have been appalled to know that SPACEGUARD was now keeping track of half a million.
Only the five giants—Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Eunomia, and Vesta—were more than two hundred kilometers in diameter; the vast majority were merely oversized boulders that would fit into a small park. Almost all moved in orbits that lay beyond Mars. Only the few that came far enough sunward to be a possible danger to Earth were the concern of SPACEGUARD. And not one in a thousand of these, during the entire future history of the solar system, would pass within a million kilometers of Earth.
The object first catalogued 31/439, according to the year and the order of its discovery, was detected while it was still outside the orbit of Jupiter. There was nothing unusual about its location; many asteroids went beyond Saturn before turning once more toward their distant master, the Sun. And Thule II, most far-ranging of all, traveled so close to Uranus that it might as well be a moon of that planet.
But a first radar contact at such a distance was unprecedented; clearly, 31/439 must be of exceptional size. From the strength of the echo, the computers deduced a diameter of at least forty kilometers. Such a giant had not been discovered for a hundred years. That it had been overlooked for so long seemed incredible.
Then the orbit was calculated, and the mystery was resolved—to be replaced by a greater one. 31/439 was not traveling on a normal asteroidal path, along an ellipse which it retraced with clockwork precision every few years. It was a lonely wanderer among the stars, making its first and last visit to the solar system—for it was moving so swiftly that the gravitational field of the Sun could never capture it. It would flash inward past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury, gaining speed as it did so, until it rounded the Sun and headed out once again into the unknown.
It was at this point that the computers started flashing their “We have something interesting” sign, and, for the first time, 31/439 came to the attention of human beings. There was a brief flurry of excitement at SPACEGUARD headquarters, and the interstellar vagabond was quickly dignified by a name instead of a mere number. Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and Roman mythology; now they were working through the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened Rama.
For a few days, the news media made a fuss over the visitor, but they were badly handicapped by the sparsity of information. Only two facts were known about Rama: its unusual orbit and its approximate size. Even this last was merely an educated guess, based upon the strength of the radar echo. Through the telescope, Rama still appeared as a faint, fifteenth-magnitude star—much too small to show a visible disc. But as it plunged in toward the heart of the solar system, it would grow brighter and larger month by month; before it vanished forever, those orbiting observatories would be able to gather more precise information about its shape and size. There was plenty of time, and perhaps during the next few years some spaceship on its ordinary business might be routed close enough to get good photographs. An actual rendezvous was most unlikely; the energy cost would be far too great to permit physical contact with an object cutting across the orbits of the planets at more than a hundred thousand kilometers per hour.
So the world soon forgot about Rama. But the astronomers did not. Their excitement grew with the passing months as the new asteroid presented them with more and more puzzles.
First of all, there was the problem of Rama’s light curve. It didn’t have one.
All known asteroids, without exception, showed a slow variation in their brilliance, waxing and waning in a period of a few hours. It had been recognized for more than two centuries that this was an inevitable result of their spin and their irregular shape. As they toppled end over end along their orbits, the reflecting surfaces they presented to the sun were continually changing, and their brightness varied accordingly.
Rama showed no such changes. Either it was not spinning at all or it was perfectly symmetrical. Both explanations seemed unlikely.
And with that, Arthur C. Clarke kicks off Rendezvous with Rama, the story of first human contact between human beings and the mysterious extrasolar object known as Rama, the interception—and exploration—of which proves to be a more incredible adventure than any human could ever have bargained for. Clarke’s prose is wry and lithe and captivating, and whatever he lacks in characterization, he makes up for in drama, imagination, and storytelling ability. I enjoyed the heck out of Rendezvous with Rama and reread it regularly. It truly deserved the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Awards it won in 1974, the year after its publication. I don’t understand why we keep getting trite, derivative, CG-heavy, incomprehensible, and artistically bland science fiction fare like Annihilation and After Earth at the box office when amazing tales like Rendezvous with Rama are waiting in the wings. Look at that piece of digital fan art I posted at the top of this answer and ask yourself whether this story wouldn’t blow you away on the big screen.
Thinking Bits 