Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Despite my affinity for science fiction, I have never read much by one of the genre's more famous writers, Arthur C. Clarke. It may be that watching 2001: A Space Odyssey gave me a skewed view of what his books were like, or it may have been that I never found his books at the library. At any rate, my wife picked this book up at a used book store and recommended it to me, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Arthur C. Clarke, along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, formed the "Big Three" of science fiction. Rendezvous with Rama is a classic, straight-forward book about mankind's first encounter with evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life, in the form of an enormous spinning cylinder passing through our solar system. As an exploration team investigates the cylinder, Clarke spins a tale of a self-contained world traveling the galaxy for a mysterious purpose. Most notable about this book is the hard science foundation for the story -- there are no transporter beams or warp drives. All the technology Clarke writes about is possible under current scientific theory. The novel won both a Hugo and a Nebula award, and deserves its reputation as a science fiction classic.