In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a brilliant novel called A Fall of Moondust. It tells a story about a vehicle full of tourists on the moon who get trapped underground in a pit that quickly gets covered over with fine, silky dust. What sets the story apart is that there is no battle between good and evil. There are no protagonists and no villains. Every character in the book is good and their conflict is with the situation, not with other living entities. Every story needs a conflict and this one shifted the role of antagonist to a random occurrence of bad luck. Fast forward to the 1970s and Clarke wrote another novel, Rendezvous with Rama, that similardoesn’t entirely eliminate conflict between characters, but the conflict is displaced to the situation instead. Therein lies the problem.
Far off in the future, when other planets have been colonized, a mysterious cylinder enters our galaxy and heads directly towards the sun. A team of scientists, headed by a commander named Norton, enter the cylinder and find an artificially manufactured world complete with suns, land, a lake with an islands and skyscrapers. The bulk of the story involves their explorations of the craft which they name “Rama” after a Hindu deity. Rama at first appears to be uninhabited, but explorations later reveal that it has creatures they call “biots”, being partly mechanical and partly biological. Their purpose appears to be for manual labor, not to think or analyze. Who they work for is a mystery. Meanwhile a committee of scientists and planetary diplomats hold meetings where they try to make sense of Rama and plan on how to manage the situation.
The concept of “conflict” is especially important in this novel, especially because it is minimized to such an extent. As stated previously, the conflict is between the people and their situation. In a scientific sense, they gather as much information as they can and do their best to interpret it. Otherwise there are some minor disagreements about procedures and interpretations of what little data they collect. The worst that happens is that the government of Mercury, called “Hermians” since “Mercury” was the name the Romans gave to the Greek god Hermes, attaches a nuclear bomb to Rama so they can detonate it in case Rama turns out to be sent with bad intentions. As wrongheaded as the Hermians are, their action is not malicious and, in fact, no one in the book has any evil motives. Even the biots are completely neutral to the point of complete indifference towards the explorers that land on Rama.
On a subtle level, Clarke expresses his favoritism towards science and I think this is the main point of the book. The contrasting viewpoint of religion is provided through the character of Rodrigo, a Christian who explores Rama alongside the other crew members. He insists that Rama has been sent by God to collect all the Christians on Judgment Day when Earth will be destroyed and the faithful will be taken to a better planet. Of course, his interpretation is wrong. Rama, to the best of everybody’s knowledge, serves no religious purpose at all. Still, Rodrigo is just as intelligent, hard-working, and curious as the other crew members so Clarke isn’t saying that religious people are necessarily bad. He is just rejecting their religious paradigm in favor of the more accurate scientific method that involves gathering data and drawing the best conclusions that can be drawn from the amount of evidence provided.
So Arthur C. Clarke clearly shows his favorable view of science, but what does this lead to in the end? The humans are unable to produce any explanation that fully explains Rama other than speculation. Is the author robbing us of a satisfactory climax to the story? Not at all. What he really does is show us the nature of scientific inquiry. Science stats with gathered, verifiable evidence and with insufficient evidence, a final conclusion is impossible. The explorers of Rama did not gather enough evidence to give the scientists enough data to form a complete explanation so we are left without any answers and an open end to the story. Clarke shows us the true nature of science in this way. The character of Rodrigo, representing faith and belief, can not live without meaningful answers so creates a false religious fantasy to fill in the gap in his knowledge even though it proves to be wrong in the end. Scientists, on the other hand, will allow the problem of Rama to remain unsolved until they gather more information, hopefully learning enough to eventually draw a realistic conclusion while being content to admit they don’t know what Rams is until then. It is better to admit when you can’t answer a question than it is to create a fake answer and cling to it as ultimate truth to shelter yourself from uncertainty. Socrates said something to that effect via Plato so many centuries ago.
But is this a successful novel? The best part is that Arthur C. Clarke explains scientific theory through story telling in a simplistic and approachable way while his handling of the religious question is gentle and non-combative. Aside from the theoretical subtext of the writing, it really is an old-fashioned adventure story with roots in Golden Age pulp science-fiction stories where heroes travel to other galaxies, dimensions, planets, or hidden regions of the Earth for the purpose of exploration and conquest. Only in Clarke’s handling of this antiquarian theme, the racist overtones of older times have been eliminated by making Rama uninhabited with the exception of the mindless and harmless biots who do nothing but work. The story is a bit on the light side since the minimalization of conflict makes most of the narrative action based, involving explorers in dangerous situations or else it protrays some light intellectualism with scientists and diplomats trying to solve problems. The characters are weak, serving functional or mechanical narrative purposes rather than humanistic ones. They are cartoonish and lacking in depth. Even the scientific subtext is juvenile, being the type of thing you might learn in junior high school, albeit without the critique of religion that would be forbidden in our regressive 21st century mentality where people still deny evolution and insist that the Earth is flat and Bigfoot is real.
Rendezvous with Rama did not leave a strong impression. As far as novels without villains go, Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust was realized much more effectively and even a tone of optimism. This might be a good book for introducing scientific theory to a younger audience, but it doesn’t add up to much more than diversion for a seasoned reader.
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