Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (5 stars)

I loved this one, originally published in 1972 it has held up well, sans some uncomfortable sexism. It won all the awards (Hugo, Nebula, and others). It's a fascinating exploration of an unknown alien object.

There's absolutely no character development. It could almost be a scientific journal article, but it's actually a really interesting discovery and exploration story. One of my favourite parts was the attention to detail about travel through the artifact, including mind games played on the explorers by low gravity in an enormous indoor space:

Too much thinking along these lines evoked yet a third image of Rama, which he was anxious to avoid at all costs. This was the viewpoint that regarded it once again as a vertical cylinder, or well—but now he was at the top, not the bottom, like a fly crawling upside down on a domed ceiling, with a fifty-kilometer drop immediately below. Every time he found this image creeping up on him, he needed all his will power not to cling to the ladder in mindless panic.

It's well written, but fairly cold and impersonal, with some rare more poetic moments like this:

Rama is a cosmic egg, being warmed by the fires of the Sun. It may hatch at any moment.” The Chairman of the committee looked at the Ambassador from Mercury in frank astonishment.

Quibbles:

• It seems really unlikely to me that aliens would have similar body geometry to humans, but the explorers don't seem to find this remarkable at all. I was waiting to find out that it's actually a human artifact created by time-travelling humans...
• Space travel is more advanced than present day, but I found the amount of extra equipment lying around unused on a spaceship that wasn't built as an exploration vessel stupidly implausible. There's crates and crates of equipment brought into Rama, spare 20kW electric motors, and even a recreational plane-bike???

And on the sexism, it was sad to see how many times "men" was written in sentences like these, but also not surprising for the 70's:

...at least for men who were trained to face the realities of space. Perhaps no one who had never left Earth, and had never seen the stars all around him, could endure these vistas. But if any men could accept them, Norton told himself with grim determination, it would be the captain and crew of the Endeavour. He looked at his chronometer.

The reviews of the sequels are terrible, so I'll probably stop at this one.

5 stars.