A muser tagged me a really long time ago, with a pretty interesting Bookworm tag. I’m completing it now. Was off blogging for some time, but hopefully will be more current now. So apologies Muser, here it is.

The tag was :

Pick up the nearest book.Open to page 123.Find the fifth sentence.Post the next three sentences.Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you .

The book I’m currently reading is “Rendezvous with Rama’ by Arthur C. Clarke. It’s about a deep space encounter with an asteroid, which turns out to be an alien space-ship. The story is set in the year 2130, and describes a time when the human race has spread out to the nearby planets. All asteroids hurtling around in near space are tracked by Project Spaceguard, a Project setup to ensure that no asteroid crashes into earth and destroys humanity, as has happened in the past. Asteroids of ‘interest” are named, while others remain mere numbers. One particular asteroid of interest, named Rama, because the astronomers having exhausted Greek and Roman mythology are now cycling through the Hindu Pantheon, is now hurtling towards our solar system, and plans are afoot to intercept it.

The spaceship that is chosen to rendezvous with Rama, is the Endeavor, captained by Commander Norton. He intercepts and set down on Rama, only to find a seemingly dead ship. The 5th sentence on page 122 (switching to 122 instead of 123, since 123 by itself might sound rather disjointed) describes what the crew sees, when they finally manage to enter Rama :

“The machines were sleeping, they were not even ticking over. Would they ever wake again, and for what purpose ? Everything was in perfect condition as usual. It was easy to believe that the closing of a single circuit in some patient, hidden computer would bring all this maze back to life.”

“Rendezvous with Rama” won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Even so I must say, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I’d expected to, and found myself skimming over pages. While I’ve really enjoyed Clarke’s first 2 installments of the Space Odyssey, “R with R” wasn’t as great becuase it lacked character development and the “human angle”. There is no human story here, Norton lands on Rama, and thereon begins the description of Rama. And it goes on for the whole book; I kept waiting for something to happen.