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Page 101
between satisfying plot and the closure of an idea." George Slusser finds the bathetic ending to be part of Clarke's rather unattractive satiric intent: the "tongue-in-cheek transcendence" is merely the last of the "deflating moments'' whereby mankind is mocked as a "stupid tourist before the mysteries of the universe." But while Norton does indeed approach despair at Rama's inscrutability, Clarke is continuously urging the reader to distinguish between those enigmas which are capable of being solved and those which are not. The former lead to important truths; the latter are merely irrelevant. If we do so distinguish, we find that Clarke does offer us a transcendent vision in Rama, but one far less reliant on supernatural intervention and so more accessible than is to be found elsewhere in his oeuvre. We find, too, a work comic without satiric bitterness, and one full of its creator's delight in having constructed an artifact awesome not in its strangeness, but in the uncanny sense of familiarity with which it is haunted.
Nicholas Ruddick, "The World Turned Inside Out: Decoding Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama," Science-Fiction Studies 12, No. 1 (March 1985): 42-43
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John Hollow
(. . .) the final difference between Clarke's 2001 and Kubrick's is that Clarke hopes that, whatever the future may hold, the race will not have lived in vain. He does not know what a Star-Child would do, but he hopes that the evolution thus suggested, the evolution beyond the bomb, will happen. He hopes that the descendants of Moon-Watcher and his cousins will not pass as meaninglessly as the dinosaurs seem to have done. We may not have any more understanding of the Star-Child than Moon-Watcher would have of us, but our having had to have been in order for the Star-Child to be is terribly important to the novel. The design is that evolution goes from flesh to machine to spirit, and each of the steps is both necessary and legitimized by the result. The machine step, which is the surprising one, is justified by exactly what Kubrick fears in such a change: Clarke's Bowman becomes as emotionless as a robot as he journeys on alone. As Kubrick's Bowman gets further and further from the family of humans, he confronts the universe on a more and more individual basis. He is the young man growing up, discovering that the universe and himself are more and better than he had been taught. Clarke's Bowman, on the other hand, is able to hurry through the machine stage of evolution because the distance from other humans brings him closer to a universal perspective.

 
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