I read Lem when I was young and it was a chore. I read him again when I was older and found his stuff to be pretty dated. I couldn't even remember what Herbert wrote, even though I read Dune (not the 1000 follow ups though) recently. It made almost no impression on me. Maybe it's like War & Peace where it has been copied so much that the original doesn't seem that, well, original. Not sure who Dick is. The only overlap we seem to have is our dislike for Egan. I read a LOT of his short stories (recommended by fans of Lem btw), and it was just entirely boring - the only one I remember is…
Cool! I'm trying with Rendezvous with Rama https://www.kathaaverse.com/play/custom-Rendezvous%20with%20...
> And here I am imagining what it would be like to first astronauts landing on one of your worlds. What would an explorer feel upon seeing vast cities and machinery, but seeing no trace of the people who built it. This reminds me of Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama
That was Clark, not Asimov. But on the topic of Rama, what a disappointing conclusion those sequels produced. I'm not sure which was worse, the Rama sequels or Crystal Skull. Either way, best to pretend they don't exist when recommending Rendezvous with Rama to people.
> I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school. What book was it? I ask because the first real science fiction book that I ever read, that inspired a life-long love for the genre, and which I read under the age of ten, was Rendezvous With Rama, which did contain a sex scene. And the presence of said sex scene didn't traumatize me or anything; I mostly just didn't understand it. Certainly not worth preventing me from having access to that book in its entirety over!
That’s true, though I suspect in that case it would be a known object with ample evidence (a la Rendezvous With Rama) or undetected. It’s definitely possible to imagine a scenario where a handful of people or “the government” somehow witnessed the only fleeting evidence of its existence in our atmosphere, but it still seems exceedingly unlikely.
Rendezvous with Rama is basically a travelogue. I enjoyed it well enough but there are probably 100s of SF books/stories I would choose to adapt to film before that one. But we'll see. I may well be wrong but the necessary adaptations probably won't be loved by fans.
I wish I could describe the near physical pain I feel that "Rendezvous with Rama" isn't yet a great Denise Villeneuve movie, and the "Night's Dawn Trilogy" isn't yet a multi-season series on Apple TV. The list goes on.
Rendezvous with Rama - A. C. Clarke SPOILERS A third option to alien contact. Not peace or war but simply indifference. Skewers the human hubris at the center of most sci-fi novels.
Your starship would have to be something similar to Rama[1] for me to even consider it. A thousand years on anything similar to an upscaled contemporary spacecraft sounds like torture. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama