The first Rama book is obviously just about the big ship visiting us but in the latter novels something very similar happens except it's not for human transcendence.
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Not really. In a way, Childhood's End (the book) was one of the starting points for '2001 - A Space Odyssey'. 'Rendezvous With Rama' was originally a 'one off' book, with the sequels cashing in on it later on (and with a fair bit of them being written by Gentry Lee anyway). Before 'Rama', Clarke had already used the idea of a spacecraft visiting the Solar System in 'The Fountains Of Paradise' (although it was crewed by an Artificial Intelligence).
shareStill, I feel like many ideas in the later Rama novels stems from here. And apparently The Fountains of Paradise too. Rama feels somewhat like The Greatest Hits of Arthur C. Clarke so to speak.
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Rama feels somewhat like The Greatest Hits of Arthur C. Clarke so to speak.
Clarke was never averse to re-using ideas in his books. In the novel version of 2001, there's a sequence with huge jellyfish type creatures in Jupiter's atmosphere that was a straight lift from the novella 'A Meeting With Medusa', 2001 itself had its origins in 'The Sentinel' (and, to some extent, 'Childhood's End' - which also had echoes of 'The City And The Stars' in its descriptions of alien worlds) and the novella 'Encounter In The Dawn' showed a meeting between aliens and pre-Babylon humans that was more or less a dry run for the first part of 2001. Actually, thinking about it, 2001 was even more of a 'Greatest Hits' collection than Rama...