Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

“A story of aliens, space, and adventure, featuring no aliens”

Overview: Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke first published in 1973. Set in the 2130s, the story is about a 50-by-20-kilometer cylindrical alien starship that enters the Solar System and the team of explorers who are sent to explore it. 

Clarke does a great job with the scientific tone and meticulous details that slowly build the reader's anticipation that something very big is going to happen when humans land on and make their way into the craft. Gripping is the best way to describe it. 

I fucking loved this book. This is a bit more sci-fi than I tend to read, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. It’s one of those books that you can just visualize in your head without even realizing that you’re reading. 

Rama is very well written and although the characters are not the most complex I have ever encountered, they make very logical decisions and do not stray from their character. The real beauty in the story is the gradual unraveling of the secrets hidden within Rama as well as its strong grounding in real-world scientific principles as well as what might realistically be possible with sufficiently advanced engineering.

Overall, Rama is straightforward, clean, technical without being too much so, well written and a good story with an intriguing premise.

Dune by Frank Herbert

“Less a novel and more like a whole new world”

Set in the distant future amidst a feudal interstellar society in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs, Dune tells the story of young Paul Atreides, whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis.

If you want to talk about building new worlds, Frank Herbert absolutely kills it with Dune. There's a good reason why this novel is being made into a film. It's epic, and at around 500 pages, although a little slow in places, the story is just getting started.

Dune has love, hand to hand combat, futuristic technology, planetary battles, weird voice magic, and sandworms - what more could you ask for in a sci-fi novel?

The book takes some time to get used to, because Herbert uses so many adjectives to describe things and those are mixed in with odd names, new planets, made up weapons, and titles that don’t exist in the English language. Once you get accustomed to all of that (or refer to the included appendix) the book is a well-written adventure that kept me engaged from start to finish. Although I highly recommend Dune, I don’t know if I have it in me to finish the five other books in the Dune Chronicles. With that said, I’m looking forward to the movie and hope, as do most other people, that they don’t mess it up too badly.