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offer, it seems, a vision that has proved so appealing that it has led to what Hardesty has called the "almost cult status of Clarke's other works about aliens" (in particular Childhood's End [1953], 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], and 2010: Odyssey Two [1982]). Instead, the alien artifact Rama, indifferent to the stir it has caused among the United Planets, departs the Solar System and leaves the reader with a sense of bathos and frustration as a result of all the enigmas left unsolved. We may praise Clarke's sophisticated techniques of estrangement based on rigid extrapolation, and feel awe at his vision of an insignificant human race, still crudely homocentric, suddenly gaining a glimpse of the unknowability of the cosmos, but we still feel let down. Awe is all very well, and won the novel its prizes; but in the long term we want solutions to the riddle of Rama, and there Clarke seems to fail us. |
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Yet while Rendezvous with Rama is full of enigmas, they are of human manufacture and so have human solutions. If we forget that the alien artifact is the product of a human imagination, we are in danger of missing the point of the novel. Clarke's strategy in Rama is different in kind from, and far more daring than, the more characteristically Clarkeian alien encounters in Childhood's End and the Odysseys. We note, first of all, that there are no aliens in Rendezvous with Rama. This hardly seems an insight; yet if we combine this idea with the now well-accepted one that there are no such things as aliens in good SF, we may watch as the apparent difficulties caused by the unresolved elements in the novel all but evaporate. We must, therefore, either attempt to decode Rama or merely seek consolation, like Eric S. Rabkin, in the idea that because the Ramans seem to do everything in threes, there may perhaps be another chance to explore Rama and that next time (perhaps) we will be readier. |
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What Roland Barthes calls the hermeneutic code dominates the text of Rama. The novel's energy lies not in plot or character, but in the posing of a riddle, followed by the discovery of an apparent solution, followed by the realization that a deeper riddle is implied by this solutionand so on until the very structure of the universe seems to founder ("There goes Newton's Third Law"). After Rama's departure, everything is changed for mankind in the 22nd century, but nothing is understood. Some critics have confessed to a disappointment similar to that suffered by Commander Norton, leader of the explorers of Rama: "a sense of anticlimax and the knowledge of opportunities missed." E. Michael Thron, for example, speaks of his own "sense of emptiness at the end of the book," a result of ''the gap |
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