At first, only a few things are known about the celestial object that astronomers dub Rama. It is huge, weighing more than ten trillion tons. And it is hurtling through the solar system at inconceivable speed. Then a space probe confirms the unthinkable: Rama is no natural object. It is, incredible, an interstellar spacecraft. Space explorers and planet-bound scientists alike prepare for mankind's first encounter with alien intelligence. It will kindle their wildest dreams... and fan their darkest fears. For no one knows who the Ramans are or why they have come. And now the moment of rendezvous awaits -- just behind a Raman airlock door.
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, the 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 an hour.
Rendezvous With Rama Epub 12
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I cannot be confident that this bibliography is complete, or completely accurate, since Clarke's career represents, for several reasons, a bibliographer's nightmare: he wrote incessantly throughout his life; he regularly produced items for minor or obscure publications that are rarely available in libraries; he constantly provided new introductions or afterwords to republications of books and stories that can easily escape notice; he sometimes republished his works under different titles or in slightly revised or edited forms; and he made little or no effort to keep track of his own activities, so that, for example, it may forever be impossible to provide a comprehensive listing of his television appearances. Even David N. Samuelson's valuable and seemingly comprehensive bibliography, while extremely helpful in compiling this bibliography, contained a number of omissions and errors, and while I have corrected the errors I noticed, others may have gone undetected. Further, Samuelson cannot assist anyone dealing with his post-1980 works, and no other scholar to my knowledge has attempted to compile a comprehensive bibliography of these more recent texts. 2ff7e9595c
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