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long winter nights must dust the desert with frost, as the last moisture left in the thin air of Earth congealedbut the city knew neither heat nor cold. It had no contact with the outer world; it was a universe itself.
The city of Diaspar, like the castle of "Sleeping Beauty," hovers in the near-dead "always afternoon." A world sealed off from the wider world, the city awaits renewed contact. Just as the enchanted castle existed ''long, long ago," Diaspar exists in that far future when the very atmosphere of Earth has thinned. "Sleeping Beauty" is a story about a girl who at fifteen pricks her finger on a spindle and swoons back into a bed, not to awaken until kissed by her proper mate one hundred years later. The whole of her world falls asleep with her. In Clarke's novel the hero, Alvin, occupies a similarly central position: through no fault of his own he is, as it says in Against the Fall of Night, "the only child to be born . . . for seven thousand years." To make this point clearer, the later The City and the Stars calls Alvin "the first child to be born . . . for at least ten million years." "Sleeping Beauty" defines its own happy ending as the reawakening of the Princess and her marriage to the Prince; Clarke's novels define their happy endings as the release of the people of the city and the people of the country from their respective isolation. Alvin, like the sexually successful Prince, is the agent of this change: he must break out of the city and into the country to cross-fertilize the cultures and start progress up again. As in the fairy tale, the ending is happy.
Eric S. Rabkin, "Fairy Tales and Science Fiction," Bridges to Fantasy, ed. George E. Slusser, George R. Guffey, and Mark Rose (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 8889
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Nicholas Ruddick
From the unprecedented number of awards that Rendezvous with Rama received on its publication in 1973, we might suppose that the book would be, in the words of William H. Hardesty, "one of those novels obviously destined to become instant classics." However, the first flush of enthusiasm quickly faded, so that in John Hollow's recent book-length study of Clarke's fiction, Rama receives about as much attention as the early Sands of Mars (1951) and the undistinguished Glide Path (1963). The novel has not been neglected, but it has never been given the sort of attention it deserves. It is not hard to see why: Rama fails to

 
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