John, Thanks. I guess it was slightly OTT. I’m not a great fan of Clarke’s style but “turgid” was definitely unfair. His sci-fi contains a lot of very good stuff but he concentrates on technical detail rather than characters. In any case Rama is definitely worth a read and the parallels with ‘Oumuamua are interesting. In general reading sci-fi from that era shows that we have advanced far more rapidly in some areas (e.g. computers, telescopes, imaging) than most authors expected, and far more slowly in others (manned spaceflight, politics?).
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