Books — hermiene.net

A collection of virtually every short story of Arthur C. Clarke. See Structure for links to some of them.

The stories are of varying quality, although most are very good (and some are truly excellent). As this is a compilation, it's hard to give a verdict, but I definitely recommend it to you if you're a Clarke fan.

Fifty short-short stories from fifty different authors are collected here.

Almost all of the stories are truly excellent, and I have transcribed some of the best ones and put them on my Short Stories page (Men Are Different, Texas Week, The Haunted Space Suit, and Counter Charm). Go there for a sample before you buy the book. (You will buy it, remember.)

A large cylindrical object is spinning so fast through the solar system that humans want to take a look at it before it whizzes past them. They dispatch the Endeavour to intersect its orbit and quickly discover that the cylinder is a spaceship of some kind designed by an intelligent species. Once they make it aboard Rama, the crew meticulously describe the interior of it and you should eventually get a really good feel for its construction. The novel details the crew's discoveries aboard Rama.

Seventy years after the first book, a second Rama spacecraft enters our solar system, and an expedition is again sent to rendezvous with it. They board it as easily as the first crew boarded the first spacecraft, but they soon discover a few differences between the two craft.

This book (and the subsequent ones) contains a lot character development, as they are written primarily by Lee. In this one, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but it takes off eventually, really.