Rendezvous with Rama

I just finished reading Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. This book is about an alien spacecraft that comes into the solar system. At first, we think it is an asteroid, but we then discover that it is a perfect cylinder and go to investigate it more. We send the spaceship Endeavor (a different one) to the ship, but they only have a few weeks to work on it before they will have to abandon it because it will go too close to the sun and because it will leave the solar system. When they go down inside, they find that it is completely dead, most likely because their recycling system didn't work efficiently enough to sustain them. Still, they do a lot of exploring, including trying to figure out why there is no life there anymore, especially since the atmosphere is actually breathable for humans. But after a few days of exploring, the ship suddenly comes to life and everyone is forced to consider what is happening. Eventually, small creatures start to populate the ship, but none capable of being the builders. Throughout this process, time is ticking away, and Endeavor will soon have to leave. Near the end of the book, the people of Mercury decide to send up a missile to destroy Rama, the name of the alien ship, because it could easily threaten their well being as it could probably destroy their planet or do other bad things, but the crew of the Endeavor decides to disable the missile because blowing up Rama could trigger an inter-stellar war which could be disastrous for humans. At the end of the book, Rama ends up using the sun to get a boost of speed to get to their ultimate goal which will never be known by humans. Overall, this was a very well written book and comparable with his other series A Space Odyssey. It is interesting how Arthur Clarke uses a lot of small details to really paint a picture in the readers mind of not only what it looked like, but also what it felt like to be going though. I would recommend this book to any science fiction fan, especially those who enjoyed the Space Odyssey series, though I would also recommend this book to pretty much everyone else because it was a short read, but it still had a very good plot, good character developing, and a lot of details.