This seems like a roundabout way to explain things. Operating on the assumption that every good story must have equally good characters, Liu rationalizes Rama’s poignancy by claiming that its real main characters are the alien spaceship and the reader themself. None of the astronauts on a mission to explore an abandoned alien spacecraft have very distinctive features or a dynamic arc, which we might expect from good writing. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, author Cixin Liu praises every aspect of the novel but one: Rama, he writes, “contains no deep characters at all, characters whose interior lives we would find fascinating or recognizably human.” It’s true- Rama’s characters are remarkably wooden. Do all stories need well-developed, complex characters? In his introduction to the 2020 edition of Arthur C.
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