Rendezvous with Rama

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973) I read this book when I was in high school and I still think about it, so I thought I'd re-read it. Not disappointing! It's set in the future when there are various space colonies (Moon, Pluto, Mars) and exploration ships. An alien spaceship makes its way into the solar system, heading for the Sun. It's like a 30 mile long metal cylinder and a party make their way inside it to explore. It's spinning, to create artificial gravity, and there's an entire landscape inside, complete with light source and ocean. The best thing about the book, to me, is the imagining of this landscape and world in there, and then the exploration and discovery of increasingly weird stuff, little by little. Apparently a few people have tried to get a film off the ground, including Morgan Freeman. I've read that he wants to keep it true to the spirit of the book, where it doesn't try to explain everything. I imagine, however, that the big companies who would have to finance a fairly expensive project like that would want to turn it into a horror movie with shit jumping out at you, scores of gruesome deaths, fights, chases, good vs. evil, and a sappy explanation of it all. Maybe it's best if that never happens.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron (1954) - This is the first of the Mushroom Planet series, about a small, secret planet orbiting around the Earth. I read it when I was in grade school, and again May 2016. It's interesting how much science there is in the book, for 1954, considering where we were with manned space flights at that time. The strangest thing about the story is the question of how much of this is real and how much imagined, which is never really answered, for sure. Or maybe I'm confused. I know I was confused when I read these books in grade school (there are five in the series) - they kind of freaked me out! Eleanor Cameron wrote a lot of books, including a series about a young woman named Julia Redfern, which I might read later.

Laura

Laura by Vera Caspary (1943) - The novel that the movie, Laura, was based on. I read it a few years ago and reread it in May 2016. In some ways it's exactly the same as the movie, but also, of course, very different. The book is five sections, each told from a different point of view of the various characters. Waldo Lydecker is first and by far the best. My interest in Laura is that I'm basing one of the ten sections of my new novel, K2 (working title) on the movie, and what always seemed to me a secret, underlying narrative, or alternative reality. A mystery that is never solved.