Rama

Something is falling through the solar system on a hyperbolic orbit, and it is not a comet. In 2131 the sky-watchers catch it, give it a spare Greek name — Rama — and discover a perfect cylinder fifty kilometres long: spinning, sealed, silent, a world turned outside-in that will not slow for anyone. This is Arthur C. Clarke's Rama: first contact as pure enigma, where the visitor is a place, not a people. The survey ship Endeavour has only weeks to board the intruder and read what it can before Rama rounds the sun and is gone forever. That opening voyage, Rendezvous with Rama, stands complete on its own — an austere marvel of hard science fiction that took both the Hugo and the Nebula. Three later novels, written by Clarke with engineer Gentry Lee — Rama II, The Garden of Rama, Rama Revealed — return to the cylinder generations on and trade cool distance for crowded human drama: colonists, faith, betrayal, all sealed inside the drum. One shelf holds both temperaments, and readers part company over which they prefer. What endures is the scale and the withholding — corridors of unknowable machinery, a frozen cylindrical sea, tending-machines serving a maker who never appears. Clarke offers awe without reassurance and answers almost nothing; the Ramans, it is said, do everything in threes. Begin with Rendezvous with Rama. It asks nothing before it and gives everything the world is known for; carry on into the Lee collaborations only if you want the mystery peopled.