A VIDEO SUMMARIZING 'RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA' WITH ILLUSTRATIONS (FINAL POST)
APRIL 27, 2022 JBOUSHKA@AOL.COM LEAVE A COMMENT EDIT
Model railroad for my screenplay setting in an O�Neill Cylinder, 2017-8
'The Full Story of RendezVous with Rama', by Sci-fi Secrets, 66 minutes, summarizes (in audio-book style), Arthur C. Clarke's 1979 novel 'Rendezvous with Rama' There are indications that Denis Villeneuve will' film this book around 2023, after he completes the sequel to Dune. (The video channel offers other summaries without spoilers.)
On Dec. 4, 2015 I had mentioned Morgan Freeman's plans to film Clarke's book (which I read in the early 1980s). I also described earlier versions of my own screenplay which is now called 'Do Ask, Do Tell: Second Epiphany' and was last discussed here in detail May 22, 2021 with its registration.
There is also a Rama II series by Gentry Lee et al about a second O�Neill Cylinder entering the solar system.
The original novel depicts an O'Neill Cylinder about 25 miles long, with a cylindrical sea in the middle and a cliff on one side. The creatures seem to be mechanical robots that resemble arthropods. The cities also contain holograms.
My screenplay has a setting on an O'Neill Cylinder mounted on Titan, intended to become an escape vessel to move to another solar system with 'chosen people' with back stories from my books.
My copy of Clarke's book is a paperback by Marimer Books with an introduction by Ken Liu.
(Posted: Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 11:30 AM by John W. Boushka)
Earlier:
'Rendezvous with Rama' (1972) is relevant to my own 'Do Ask,, Do Tell: Epiphany' screenwriting project. There has long been a film project involving Morgan Freeman which Wikipedia describes as being in 'development hell'. It would be possible to imagine crowdfunding, given the popularity of the novel.
The story starts in 2077, when an asteroid hit causes huge casualties and damage on Earth, coming close to permanent extinction. 60 years later, in 2037, Earth has set up better early warning systems, and sends out a space party to examine the approaching craft, which turns out to be a 50-km-long cylinder, rotating to create artificial gravity on the inside surface, and with interesting landscapes and cities inside, divided into two 'hemi-cylinders' by a 'cylindrical sea'.
There is a scene where an astronaut jumps off a cliff in this world. My understanding is that artificial gravity requires contact with the inner surface to work, so that the actual surface presses on you and creates 'weight' from your mass; there is no gravitational field to pull on you without contact (that requires mass, which 'Star Trek' gets around with super dense (like neutron-star material) gravity plates underneath).
In my own screenplay, there is a an alien 'angels'' space station on Titan, which has 1/7 Earth's gravity, so the ashram (with the abductees, so to speak) is built on the inside of a Rama cylinder that sits perpendicular to the surface. (Of, if NASA has seen it, they just won't tell us!) But the pull of Titan would still distort the sense of gravity, producing a sense of tilting, and could pull a person (at a velocity of the square root of 1/7 Earth's) toward a 'wall' if he jumped off the group, so people would need magnetic shoes until they got used to the environment. I've wondered how you could really jog inside a rotating space station depending on centrifugal effects for gravity.
(Published: Friday, Dec. 4, 2015, at 1:30 PM EST)