Needful Things by Stephen King

Uncle Stevie has just the thing for you

By a quick count, I figure I've read more than thirty of Stephen King's books at this point, which is about half of his output so far. I just now got around to reading 1991's Needful Things, and I'm sorry to say it's not going on my favorites list.

Review

The premise is simple and quite promising: A stranger comes to the small town of Castle Rock and opens a store, a kind of a curiosity shop to outward appearances. The owner (Leland Gaunt) always has in stock (or will soon) the one item that each individual who comes into the shop desires more than anything else. Of course, the real price of that item will be far greater than money.

The premise is simple and very promising: A stranger comes to the small town of Castle Rock and opens a store -- kind of a curiosity shop to outward appearances. The owner (Leland Gaunt) always has in stock (or will soon) the one item that each individual who comes into the shop desires more than anything else. Of course, the real price of that item will be far greater than money.

Introducing a supernatural or alien element into a small town and watching its inhabitants spin out of control is a plot device that King employs often and well. King excels at creating a large cast of characters, each with their own compelling back story, and playing them off against one another. A great deal of the novel consists of Gaunt snaring the locals with irresistible bait and thereby enlisting them in his scheme. When he trips the final switch on that scheme, the town erupts into an orgy of madness and violence that has you turning the pages as fast as you can.

The problem is that the scheme is so elaborate it takes a painfully long time to set up and entails a lot of repetition of the same elements. It's obvious from the beginning what kind of creature Gaunt is (there are no twists at the end). When reading a story about the supernatural you have to suspend disbelief to some level, but the final battle between Gaunt and the sheriff involves some less-than-believable elements that just seem silly.

King says he intended Needful Things to be not so much a horror story as a satire on 80s greed and consumerism. Clearly, the "needful things" are also a metaphor for addiction, and King is said to have just gone clean from all of his (except cigarettes) when he wrote this novel. Whatever the author's intentions, Needful Things ultimately doesn't come together as a fully satisfying work. 

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Simmons writes science fiction, horror, and mysteries

After an intriguing opening, this 600-page tome felt like slow going for a long time; but the action and suspense definitely pick up in the second half.

Review

Summer of Night (1991) reminded me in many ways of Stephen King's It (1986), which I suspect provided Simmons with a great deal inspiration for the later novel. In both books a group of kids come together to fight an ancient evil that has been lying fairly dormant in their small town for a while. The flashbacks in It are set in 1957-1958, while the action in Summer of Night takes place in 1960. The 30-year "Nostalgia Pendulum" was in full swing for both authors.

Summer of Night also reminded me of Robert McCammon's Boy's Life, which was published in 1991 and set in the early 1960s as well. It and Summer of Night feature ensemble casts of kids who work together to fight the evil that is out to get all of them. But, while his friends play their roles, Boy's Life is really Cory's show. Coming-of-age horror novels are fairly common. (Stephen King has written a slew of them, from Carrie to The Institute), but I don’t believe there are a lot where a group of kids work together and are all more-or-less equally important to the narrative.

It's a long, slow read but ultimately worth the time investment. Simmons uses those 600 pages to craft believable characters and interesting relationships between them. The novel ends with a pyrotechnic blow-out as the kids finally confront, on its own turf, the evil entity that has lurked in the placid town of Elm Haven all these years. 

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

There's more than one way to be a good Indian.

For contemporary readers, the title of this novel may feel a bit cringeworthy. Teddy Roosevelt probably coined the phrase, "The only good Indians are the dead Indians." It expressed the attitude many white settlers held that Native Americans were vicious and immoral, and that ultimately the only way to deal with them was to either kill them off or completely assimilate them. The author reflects on how this sentiment still affects the lives of tribal people. The men in the book avoid terms such as "Native American" or "Indigenous Peoples," preferring instead to call themselves "Indians," the name they grew up with. This is a horror novel that also attempts to reclaim the idea of the "Indian's curse," turning it back on tribal people themselves. 

Review

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is about four Blackfeet men -- Ricky, Lewis, Gabriel, and Cassidy -- who commit a crime in their youth, which brings a curse down on them for which payment comes due a decade later. In a short preface, we see Ricky leave a crowded roadside bar in North Dakota to relieve himself somewhere in the back of the parking lot. While he's doing that, a young elk clambers up onto a truck, doing damage and setting off alarms. The elk begins to dash wildly around the parking lot, damaging more trucks and setting off more alarms, and then charging head-down toward Ricky. He grabs an oversized wrench from a truck bed, planning to use it to protect himself, but the elk disappears. As angry men coming running toward their trucks, Ricky realizes he looks like the culprit who has done all the damage. He turns and runs across the frozen prairie, hoping to escape the mob, only to find his way blocked by a herd of elk. Ricky is beaten to death.

In part one of the book, we meet another member of the group, with the unlikely name Lewis Clarke, who is, like Ricky, also living off the reservation. Lewis lives with his white girlfriend, Peta. He works at the post office, where he has been assigned to train a new employee, Shaney, a Crow, the only other Indian who works there. Lewis recognizes that the other employees have naturally grouped the two of them together in their minds.

At home, Lewis has begun to have disconcerting visions of a dead elk in his living room. That vision morphs into another -- an elk-headed woman -- which begins to haunt him. Lewis eventually tells Shaney the story of the event that has troubled him all these years. As young men, the four friends had been hunting elk on the reservation without any luck. On the last day of the hunting season, as a snow storm was rising, the four of them ventured into land that was reserved for the elders to hunt, and ended up killing a number of elk by firing blindly into the herd. As Lewis took on the elk he had chosen as his to clean, he realized it was a young, pregnant doe that was merely crippled, not dead. It had to be shot again. He buried the unborn calf. The four men were caught in the midst of the crime by the game warden, Denny Pease, who forced them to leave the meat behind, pay a fine, and never hunt on the reservation again.

Peta is annoyed to learn that Lewis chose to share this story with Shaney but not with her. Subsequent events that I won't go into lead Lewis to become more and more paranoid, thinking that either Peta or Shaney is really what he has come to think of as the Elk Head Woman, a vengeful spirit that is out to destroy him. Eventually he murders both of the women horribly, violently, bloodily. There's no way that he could get away with it, even if he were thinking rationally. He flees, only to be hunted down and killed, not too differently from Ricky, by a vigilante mob. The reader has, up to this point, been unsure whether Lewis was really haunted by a vengeful spirit, or whether he was suffering some sort of mental breakdown. This is a bit of a spoiler, but there's no way to avoid it: at the beginning of section two, the point of view switches to that of the Elk Head Woman.

Two men from that fateful day -- Gabe and Cass -- are still close and still living on the Blackfeet reservation. The avenging spirit of the young elk turns her attention to them and to everyone around them. Gabe and Cass have decided to build a lodge and hold a sweat to honor the memory of their two dead friends. A local cop named Victor has asked Gabe and Cass let his son Nathan join them in the sweat, hoping the experience will purify Nate of some of his bad behavior. In return, Victor will manage the hot stones which have to be brought into the lodge periodically. When Elk Head Woman arrives at the lodge, she launches into a purge of her own.

Earlier in this section, we met Gabe's daughter Denorah. While Gabe is separated from his wife and not living with the two of them, he is deeply proud of his daughter, calling her his "Finals Girl" because it is she who will take her team to the basketball finals and ultimately the championship. Denorah comes to Cassidy's place the evening of the sweat lodge ceremony to pick up some money her father had promised her, but she arrives on the scene as Elk Head Woman is wreaking her bloody vengeance.

 
The third section of the book concerns Elk Head Woman's pursuit of Denorah through the wilderness to finish her vengeance. And, yes, this is where I laughed when I finally realized the author's pun in calling Denorah the Finals Girl all along.

I'll leave the summary there. If you're interested, you can find out for yourself how the final confrontation ends. Though some people seem to find Jones' prose difficult to parse, I think he writes beautifully; and the narrative becomes clearer as the tale progresses. Besides the horror story itself, the book provides interesting insights into contemporary Native American experiences. All of that said, I thought the precipitating event for the curse was a bit thin and unconvincing, so knock a point off for that. 

Pulp by Ed Brubaker

The king of contemporary crime comics.

Pulp (July 2020) is a short graphic novel written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phillips, a team that has become renowned for their crime comics series such as Criminal and Fatale. The story is set in New York in 1939 and concerns an elderly pulp Western writer named Max Winters. Max is best-known for writing a series about a gunslinger called the Red River Kid. As the yarn opens, Max has submitted the latest installment to his editor, Mort, at Six-Gun Western magazine. The editor is pleased with the story except for the ending, which seems to indicate that the Kid and his sidekick are planning to retire to Mexico. Max explains that he wants to show the whole arc of his protagonist's life, not just his youthful days as an outlaw. 

Max: Howard did this exact thing with Conan and no one complained. Sometimes he's old... sometimes he's young...

Mort: Yeah, but he's never a fuckin' farmer in Mexico, is he?

The ending is redlined, and Max is sent on his way with a payment that has been reduced to two cents a word because, as the unsympathetic Mort explains, "our circulation went down forty percent last year.” 

As if his day weren’t already going badly enough, on his way home Max sees a young orthodox Jew being bullied by a pair of antisemitic thugs at the subway station. Unlike the other passersby, Max can’t ignore what’s happening and intervenes. He gets punched for his trouble, and in the midst of the beating that follows has a heart attack. As Max lies helpless on the ground, the two goons rob him of the money he was just paid.

Max survives the heart attack. A doctor gives him some pills and tells him to cut out alcohol and cigarettes. When he finally arrives home, he tells his younger wife, Rosa, about the mugging. She assures him that they’ll get by without the money somehow and goes to the kitchen to make him something to eat. Max reflects on how Rosa’s love saved his life and worries about the fact that, as he well knows, they really can’t get by without the money.

We then learn that Max’s pulp tales about the Red River Kid are really memories, stories about Max’s own life when he was an outlaw in the West known as the Red Rock Kid. After a reckless life of robbing and fighting, he really did retire to Mexico for a time, marry, and try his hand at farming. Now, struggling to get by and to support his Mexican wife in New York in his old age, he decides to resort to robbery once more. His plans are cut short, however, by an ex-FBI agent who has been following him for some time. Watching him case an armored car route, the agent has figured out what Max is up to and stops him from going through with it. Instead, he enlists Max into helping him rob American Nazis who are shipping cash to the Fatherland to support Hitler’s war. He explains, “We’d be robbing some people who deserve it... and it wouldn’t be like that suicide run you were planning.” 

The plot takes a few twists and turns on the way to the ending, and I won’t spoil it. I will say that the story is satisfyingly well-written and draws down to a conclusion that has the feeling of inevitability. Max has a dire philosophy about the way the world works that is never proven wrong. 

On a meta level, the story provides an interesting reflection on the fact that the late period of the Old West (the 1890s) was only thirty to forty years removed from the era of famous gangsters, the Great Depression, and the beginnings of World War II. People were beginning to drive around in automobiles back East at the same time the cattle wars were still going on out West. Time periods that seem distinct to us because of the movies blended into each other for the people who were alive then. Another meta-level reflection, one that makes the story feel especially relevant to our own time, is the reminder that, before our own entry into the war, a lot of Americans cheered on Hitler and supported his rise to power. 

The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

 

Did this Robert Johnson meet the Devil at a crossroads? 

I hate marketing copy that says a book is like x crossed with y. It's lazy and it's rarely accurate. Mostly, the marketing department is looking for an easy way to grab onto the coattails of what is popular at the moment. Right, so... I'm going to make one of those comparisons in this review, anyway. 

Review

In the early pages of The Loop, a high school student begins having some sort of seizure in class. He suddenly becomes hyperviolent and, before first-responders to the scene shoot him, viciously murders one of his teachers in front of everyone. This happens near the end of the school year. Rather than try to bring students back to school after the traumatic event, the district cancels classes for the rest of the year, and graduating seniors will be mailed their diplomas rather than receiving them in a ceremony. As a result, a number of students in this small, central Oregon town decide to have an end-of-school party one night at some caves in the nearby mountains.

In the wake of the killings, the son of one of the more prominent families has gone missing. While the authorities are searching for him fruitlessly, he is holed up in one of the caves where the party is going to take place. Whatever was wrong with that other student is wrong with him, too, and he plans to share. Before the party night is over, a plague of violence will be unleashed on the town. Only a small group of students who managed to escape the infection will remain to stand in the way of the others.

The blurbs for the book inevitably invoke Stranger Things, but that's a misleading comparison. It's not a book about kids on bikes fighting otherworldly creatures. The more apt comparison -- one I think the author himself made -- would be Dazed and Confused crossed with 28 Days Later. The students are slackers, druggies, jocks, and all the other social gradations to be found in a high school. In an interview, Johnson said he was inspired by the social dynamics of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with its the rich kids versus "greasers," to attempt something similar in a more up-to-date context. The main protagonists, Lucy and Bucket, are perhaps the ultimate outsiders: an adopted Peruvian orphan and a child of Pakistani immigrants. They both have to navigate not only the tensions caused by their racial heritages in a mostly white rural town but also the pressures of a town where the disparity between rich and poor is stark.

While the setup and the inspiration may be Young Adult, the novel doesn't stay in that lane. By the second half it has veered into something closer to what David Schow called "splatterpunk." The high school kids have the homicidal energy of the infected in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later or either version of The Crazies, and the author isn't shy about describing the mayhem in vivid detail. While tourism may be the town's main industry, its most prominent employer is a biotech firm called IMTECH. And it is, of course, an IMTECH experiment gone wrong that has unleashed biomechanical parasites engineered from alien octopus tissue and an Internet-based hive mind on the unsuspecting denizens of Turner Falls.

The Loop starts slow, taking time to build out its young protagonists as believable characters, and then it kicks into overdrive with a fast-paced narrative style that invites you to quickly rush through to the end. To the author's credit, he follows the logic of the book's premise to its bitterly inevitable outcome. Honestly, it's fine, but there's nothing new here. My only complaint is that there aren't enough new ideas or narrative-shifting twists to warrant the novel's 300-page length. I'd give it an extra star if it were a hundred pages shorter. 

Monster Midway by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham admiring the midway

William Lindsay Gresham's first novel was his most famous. Nightmare Alley was published in 1946 and adapted into a movie in 1947. An unsuccessful and now forgotten second novel followed in 1949. It was seven years after the publication of Nightmare Alley, in 1953, that Gresham published his third book, Monster Midway, a non-fiction collection of essays about the world of the carnivals. His most famous novel had, in fact, been born of a lifelong fascination with carnies, psychics, and magicians. Gresham shared that fascination in Monster Midway.

Review

Perhaps the most notorious passage from the novel and both movie versions is the sequence where Clem Hoatley explains to Stanton Carlisle how a geek is made. In the opening pages of Monster Midway, Gresham tells us how he learned this bit of carny lore. Gresham, like many young men in his generation, volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As he was waiting to muster out of the conflict, he got to know a fellow American who shared his interest in carnival life. "Clem Faraday was a sergeant of medics and my immediate superior... And he was also an old-time carny." The real Clem, it turns out, had worked a ten-in-one in the South that featured a geek show as a blowoff. (If I just confused you with some of that carny lingo, don't worry; the book includes a glossary.) When Gresham pressed for more information about the geek, Clem launched into the explanation of how you find an alcoholic or an ex-soldier who's addicted to morphine and use his addiction to gradually lure him into full-on geeking. That speech went straight into Nightmare Alley.

Each chapter in the book details a different aspect of carny life. Early in, Gresham goes into some detail describing the business side of running a carnival, which I admit I found a little boring; but he quickly moves on to describing the rides, the games, the freaks, the gypsy mind-readers, the motordromes and hell drivers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, snake handlers, and other exciting sides of the carnies. He devotes a long chapter to Houdini and other escape artists. (Houdini would be the subject of Gresham's next book.) Throughout, Gresham treats the reader to glimpses behind the scenes, explaining how it all works, and even revealing the secrets of some of the gaffs and grifts. Want a roadmap for doing the psychic mind-reader act? Gresham gives it to you.

All of his stories are backed up by interviews with real-life carnies, whose names Gresham shares. The chapter on freaks is revealing because it's clear that Gresham had gotten to know many of them personally, and many wisely used the money they earned in the carnies to build comfortable, normal lives for themselves afterward. Gresham also shares tales of how he tried out doing mind-reading and magic acts on his own, gaining some first-hand experience. It all adds up to a fascinating memoir of a world that is long gone. The carnivals, fairs, circuses, and amusement parks that exist today are far more wholesome and legit than the shows that would scrounge their way across America back in the days of the Depression and the War.

The Girl in the Trunk by Bruce Cassiday

The only picture of the author I could find

I read this book as an old paperback that was published by Ace Books in July 1973. It appears to have been recently been brought back into print, after 40 years of being out of print, by a POD publisher called Bold Venture Press.

Bruce Cassiday got his start as a script writer for radio dramas, and then he became western and crime fiction editor for pulp magazine publisher Popular Publications. He also wrote for the pulps, eventually graduating to the paperbacks, cranking out not only his crime novels but novelizations of movies and TV series, as well as a bunch of Flash Gordon novels. A working-stiff writer, he even wrote how-to, diet books, and celebrity biographies.

Review

The Girl in the Trunk begins with a mosaic of events presented in short chapters. An earthquake off the coast of Chile starts a tsunami that will, in a few hours, sweep across Hawaiian beaches with destructive force. The naked corpse of a young woman is found in the trunk of a car abandoned at the Honolulu airport. The head accountant for a local firm is discovered to have embezzled half a million dollars and disappeared. Two muggers attack a drunk only to discover that he's not drunk at all but, rather, a violent cop hellbent on meting out physical punishment. Meanwhile, the daughter of the head of the police force is having a love affair with a man he hates, the leader of the Hawaiian secessionists. All these seemingly disparate threads and more, however, will smoothly merge together by the end of the novel as the action builds into a deadly race against time.

I can't claim this book rises above its time and its genre, but Cassiday does deliver a clever, fast-paced, old-school police procedural. I enjoy this sort of thing and can happily read an old Ed McBain or a recent Michael Connelly with equal pleasure. One thing I appreciate about the older, vintage American crime novels, though, is that they are usually short and action-oriented and can be easily read in a day or two, all of which describes The Girl in the Trunk.

For me personally there was an added element of interest in the fact that the novel was set in 1970s Hawaii. Having spent a fair amount of time in Hawaii myself, I was impressed with Cassiday's knowledge of the culture, locations, and idiom of Oahu. He also clearly delineates the tensions and prejudices that exist among the Pacific Islanders, Asians, Whites, and hapa who make up most of the populations of the islands. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement, which is still around, was especially strong in the 60s and 70s.

The racist language used by some of the characters (remember, the Vietnam war was still ongoing) may be a bit hard to swallow for current readers, but it is true to the times. So, unfortunately, are the sexism and misogyny. But, to paraphrase the way Walter Cronkite would end his evening news broadcasts back then, that's the way it was. If you enjoy vintage crime novels (Macdonald, McBain, etc.) or gritty 70s crime movies, The Girl in the Trunk will likely fall into your precinct.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay

Trebizond is the English name for the Turkish city of Trabzon, which is situated on the coast of the Black Sea along the old Silk Road. Rose Macaulay's novel, The Towers of Trebizond, describes the experiences of a small group of English travelers -- the narrator Laurie, her aunt Dot, and an Anglican priest with the unlikely name of Father Chantry-Pigg -- in the post-War years. 

Review

This meandering novel could easily be mistaken for a travelogue, and indeed much of it is autobiographical. Laurie, Dot, and the Father are all members of the British aristocratic intelligentsia who loved to explore the Levant (and other remote places of the world) and write down their impressions. Throughout the story, Laurie keeps running into other Brits who are writing their own "Turkey books," as she and her aunt Dot (aka Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) are planning to do. Aunt Dot has also come to Turkey because of her conviction that "Moslem" women are treated badly and that they would be more liberated if they converted to Christianity. Father Chantry-Pigg has come along because he's convinced the best form of Christianity to which they can convert is Anglicanism. The two of them have vague ideas about setting up an Anglican mission. Meanwhile, Laurie just wants to see a bit of the world and do some sketching.

Part of the pleasure of reading books like this is not just that they take you to exotic parts of the world, they also take you to distant time periods that you can never visit in person, and Macaulay does a wonderful job of transporting you to both. The novel is set during the time that the Iron Curtain had just descended over Eastern Europe. The situation along the border between Turkey and Soviet Georgia is hostile, and tourists are often suspected of being spies for one side or the other. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tension, Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg are determined to slip over into the Russian-controlled state to satisfy their curiosity about conditions on the other side. They manage to do so, which means that for the rest of the novel Laurie is left on her own. Well, not completely on her own. Aunt Dot owns a camel, which becomes Laurie's responsibility. She does ride the camel across much of Turkey and eventually gets it back to London.

Laurie's journey, which takes center stage in the second half of the book, is both geographical and interior. While she is on what is ostensibly a sort of missionary trip, she wrestles with her own feelings about religion and the High Church. On top of all that, she is involved in a love affair with a married man (identified only as Vere) with whom she eventually has a rendezvous in a yacht off Iskenderun. She is tormented by her belief that having an affair with a married man is basically stealing from the wife, while at the same time believing that she and Vere are meant for each other. No matter what, she never wants to let go of their relationship. This, in fact, very much echoed Rose Macaulay's situation in real life. 

I've seen this novel described as "farcical" and "high comedy," which it really isn't. It's charming, and it's laced with humorous observations and absurd situations, but it is the sort of book that will at best make you chuckle once in a while rather than laugh out loud. (Well, okay... I admit the part with Mr. Yorum did crack me up.) It's not all fun and games, though. The ending will likely throw you for a loop. By all means avoid reading anything about how the book ends because it sneaks up on you unawares, and I believe it is all the more powerful for that.

When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

 

To call anything nonfiction is probably naive.

I found it hard to put this book down to deal with the everyday things life puts in our way to keep us from reading.

Review

Despite my poor grasp of mathematics, I've had a nearly lifelong fascination with the discoveries of theoretical physics -- from reading George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity as a teenager to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos a few years ago. When We Cease To Understand the World reads like a series of biographical essays on the lives of the most crucial thinkers in modern physics, but the book's chapters are really fictional constructs that use the registers of nonfiction to arrive at deeper truths.

I honestly don't know how this book will strike you if you don't have a passing familiarity with names like Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. It is, however, beautifully written and focuses on human stories, so it probably won't matter if you've never heard of a Schwarzschild radius.

I really want to emphasize the quality of the writing itself. The book was originally written in Spanish (as Un verdor terrible), but Chilean author Benjamín Labatut speaks fluent English and collaborated closely on the translation.

The first section, called "Prussian Blue," is nominally about the chemist Fritz Haber and tells the stories of, among other things, cyanide, arsenic, chemical warfare, Zyklon-B, and the use of drugs to make German soldiers in World War II into fighting machines. (Along the way, we learn that the pigment for Prussian Blue was derived from cyanide salts.) Haber is known as the father of chemical warfare and was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people horribly with his chlorine gas in World War I. He also figured out how to extract nitrogen from the air to create the fertilizers that support half the world's populations today. (This is all true, by the way. Only the last paragraph of the story is fiction.) So, from the outset, we understand that these scientists' inner lives will be torn by the exigencies of war, loss, and doubt, and that the moral valences of their work may be hard to determine.

Of course, the intrusion of fiction into these accounts is bound to leave you wondering which parts are real and which are made up. In an interview, Labatut said that he thinks those who bother to do their own research will be surprised to find that many things which sound incredible really happened. "I'm using fiction to get people interested in things that are unbelievable but that are true."

While the work has been described as a non-fiction novel, the author says that he doesn't think of it as a novel at all. A collection of interrelated stories may be a better way to describe it. Certain themes wind through the book, and the final autobiographical section brings them together nicely. Whatever you call it, When We Cease To Understand the World is a gripping read and I highly recommend it.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama around 1974, about a year after it came out, while I was still in college. I enjoyed it, but my interest in Clarke was beginning to fade a bit by that time. As a kid and a teenager I'd loved his short stories and the cosmic novels like The City and the Stars and Childhood's End to the point that Clarke's work pretty well embodied what I thought science fiction ought to be. His novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out of a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick based on an old short story called "The Sentinel" (1948), was published at the end of the 60s and was his last novel before this one. Each of them featured what has come to be known in science fiction circles as a Big Dumb Object (i.e., the monolith in 2001 and the cylinder in Rama). The term, which was invented by a sf fan/critic and is meant to be a bit derogatory, refers to huge, inexplicable devices created by alien technologies at which humans can only marvel.

Having heard that Denis Villeneuve is planning to adapt the novel into a movie, I decided to reread it.

Review

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, a cylindrical object passes through the solar system. At first assumed to be an asteroid, which they name Rama, astronomers soon come to realize it is actually a constructed artifact -- a spaceship perhaps, or a probe -- that is 12 miles wide and more than 30 miles long. (There is no doubt in my mind that the speculation surrounding ‘Oumuamua as it passed through the solar system in 2017 was in part sparked by this book.) In the Clarkean near-future of the novel, humans have already built colonies on the moon and nearby planets, so they have the ability to send a manned expedition out to rendezvous with Rama and examine it up close. 

The explorers manage to find a point of entry into Rama and discover that it is cold and dark and apparently dead inside. It does have a breathable atmosphere though, and, because of its spin, it has gravity along the outer surfaces of the interior. As the object nears the sun, it begins to heat up and come to life inside. Gigantic lights illuminate the interior, a body of water that forms a ring around the midpoint begins to melt, and weather patterns develop inside the enormous habitat.

Lifelike entities emerge and begin to perform tasks, paying no attention to the human visitors. The entities appear to be an amalgam of biological and mechanical components, and the human visitors can't decide whether these are actual Ramans or merely the programmed servants of the Ramans. As Rama gets nearer the sun, the visitors have only a short time to explore as much as possible before they must abandon it. As they explore, making ever more puzzling discoveries, some of the massive processes that happen inside Rama get dangerous.

This is the kind of science fiction adventure at which Clarke excelled. There are no villains or monsters to contend with -- there are only the powerful dynamics of physics and the inscrutable ways of alien intelligences far beyond our own. After all, it was Clarke who famously predicted that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The ultimate goal of the novel is to provoke a sense of wonder at the possibilities that may await us "out there." Inevitably, it feels a bit dated nearly fifty years later, but for someone approaching it with the right frame of mind, I think it would still serve that purpose well enough today.

2001: A Space Odyssey did pretty much the same thing. Reviewers of the movie often described it as more of a "trip" than a movie because, instead of the usual Hollywood plot devices, character development, and conflicts, 2001 offered audiences a thought experiment on human evolution and cosmic destiny. If he handles the material right, Villeneuve may be able to do something similar for 21st century audiences. Will it fly today? Only time will tell.