Oumuamua - Rama

Are there other people who think the newly found interstellar object Oumuamua reminds you very much of arthur c clarkes Rama ??? of course , i'm just a dreamer!

Just this morning I added a comment to a news item. My comment: "Rendezvous with Rama".

I am waiting to hear a ship has been launched on an intercept course, or that the object is decelerating under its own power.

And do not forget, the Ramans do everything in threes.

heard they're going to listen for radio signals for like 10 hours, so who knows.

I believe!

I for one welcome our new Raman overlords.

As long as it's Rama and not a von Neumann probe... (See The Forge of God)

>4 pgmcc: All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster! :)

>6 gilroy: Wouldn't that be Raman spelled with an "e"?

>7 ThomasWatson: +1!

They're going to be checking it for alien tech. Stay tuned for further details....

They will be driven away by the constant Christmas music.

Do they not know it is Santa's warehouse in the sky? It is part if his supply chain for Christmas Eve.

Not if you take the definition of orson scott card's definition of Raman. Btw are there any other people who think he got this word from rendezvous with rama ??

and today they are going to listen for radio signals, could be that all will change at the end of the day.

NASA are supposed to have a major press conference scheduled for Thursday. At a guess, it's either going to be spectroscopy of an exoplanet has revealed organics, that suspected Dyson Sphere has been confirmed, or Oumuamua has entered a deceleration phase. Anyone care to give odds?

>13 RobertDay:, all of those would be exciting. Therefore it's probably just another new exoplanet discovery.

The artist rendering of Oumuamua looks like someone left a big poop in space...

>14 Cecrow: "...just another new exoplanet discovery" (yawn). O tempora, o mores!

>15 gilroy: I think half the excited speculation about Oumuamua is down to that artist's rendering being taken by some of the less informed journos for an actual photograph...

nice guesses though , haven't read star maker yet (sci fi novel with first suggestion of a dyson sphere), good book RobertDay ??

Curious what will be revealed tomorrow ;) ..

>17 Classic-SF: 'Star Maker' is a rather cerebral book; quite mind-expanding, but not a novel of action or character. I'm overdue for a re-read.

My go-to novel on Dyson spheres remains Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, which I'd recommend as a preferable first go at the subject.

i'll put it on my wish list ;) christmas is coming up so always love a few new books! just hand out friends and family the list , still have to catalogue all my books on librarything though, fairly new on the site..

>18 RobertDay: I am delighted you are recommending the work by someone from my home town.

I haven't read Orbitsville but I have read other books by Bob, including the Ragged Astronauts , A Wreath of Stars, Vertigo, and his short story, Slow Glass (no touchstone).

>19 Classic-SF:

I ended up cataloguing somewhere in the region of 2500 SFF books in the 6 weeks prior to the 2014 WorldCon as I was expecting to be able to fill some significant gaps in my collection... This was when I was spending frequent weekends away visiting my late Mum who was in a care home and I was working full time.

It was not an easy task as much of my SFF library was fairly inaccessible - my previous house had a walk-in storeroom under the stairs (instead of the more usual cupboard) which I had shelved out floor-to-ceiling. I also had stacks of books on the stairs that needed slotting in too. Luckily at the time I had a netbook which was small enough to balance on top of a bookcase and I was clambering up and down a small stepladder re-ordering and re-shelving books in between bouts of entering ISBNs. Still, I managed it even though I couldn't spend much longer than 15-20 mins in the library at once because of the hot weather.

I've got to repeat the task - I moved in with my partner 2 years ago, and we merged libraries. Since then, we've been buying ebooks a lot and we need to cull print copies where we've got an ebook version. We'll keep some - collectable editions and favourite authors, but wherever possible I want to get rid of physical books (I just wish backlist titles were cheaper...) Again, some of the library is inaccessible because of stuff stacked in front of the bookcases - but there's a lot more room overall (it's in a converted garage).

Damn that's a nice collection though , i have to say i'm fairly new to reading books (don't know why but just started reading few years ago, didn't know was so much fun) so my collection is not huge (i think around 250) but it's expanding rapidly. just moved from Belgium to Italy for a year or so, so the ones i have there i can only start cataloguing when i'm back.

Not such a big fan of e-books though , i tried it but somehow i enjoy normal books more, think i could have some fun though in that store-room of yours!! you're gonna sell online???

also interested to know what you see as collectable or valuable editions?? i have a 1902 first men in the moon by Wells , bought it for almost like 3 euros.. best buy .. let me know what you have guys, curious George is here!

>22 Classic-SF: My various versions of Keith Roberts Anita are valuable, and possibly a few of my James Branch Cabell hardbacks. I also have Works of Fancy and Imagination in the original Victorian box which used to be worth serious money. Collectable are some nice Gollancz editions of H P Lovecraft and some early paperback publisher's series like the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

Unfortunately, ebooks are becoming a must for me because of space considerations, commuting and where large books are concerned, a tendency to tendonitis in both wrists. Employers don't like it if you're off work because you've been reading and I'm already lugging enough paperwork around without having haul a couple of books as well (I'm commuting for 4 hours a day twice a week).

>21 Maddz:

"Funny", I catalogued my backlog years ago while caring for my mum after a major surgery... Those mums, good for so much, including providing time to catalogue on LT...

Unfortunately, there was no way I could care for Mum at home - she'd had a stroke Christmas 2012 and ended up with the classic right-side paralysis. She was wheelchair-bound (and largely bed-ridden in her last 6 months) and needed 2 people to care for her. Even giving up my job and caring for her in her own home wouldn't have worked - her local council didn't do 24-hour care at home let alone double-up calls. My house was way too small for everything she would have needed - there was no room for a stairlift for a start - and to do the conversion so she could have lived downstairs would have meant moving out for 3 months (not to mention putting my library into storage).

So my sister got her into a nursing home near her - it was more feasible for me to visit more often as it was a 90 minute drive not a 3+ hour drive. I was down every 2 weeks and would spend most of the day with her before having supper at my sister's and driving home. My sister would visit twice most days - in the morning after walking her dogs who loved visiting and in the afternoon with her children after school. (She's married and my brother-in-law has sufficient salary to support a stay-at-home wife, 4 kids, 2 dogs and a massive house & garden - and they can afford cleaners which I couldn't.)

That summer I was frantically cataloguing whenever I got enough time to get through a shelf...

>20 pgmcc: The 'slow glass' story you are most likely thinking of is Light of other days, which has been quite widely anthologised as well as being one of the framework stories in Bob's fix-up slow glass novel Other days, other eyes. It's also available online, although the last time I went looking for it I had to do a surprising amount of digging.

I have a few nice collectable sf books; a rather jolly 1920s mass-market hardback of Wells' When the sleeper awakes and an interesting German paperback of about ten years earlier of The Invisible Man, in English! A good number of first editions, some of them world firsts, and a few of them signed or autographed. In particular, I have William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties in an autographed edition of the world first edition - the UK edition actually beat the US one by a few days - which I actually acquired the day before publication as I dropped in to Roger Peyton's lamented Andromeda Bookshop one Friday lunchtime to find Rog and Bill unpacking copies of his brand new novel ready for a signing session the next day. I pitched in to help and was rewarded with the opportunity to buy a copy the day before official publication and with The Man Himself on hand ready to sign!

I have original 1950s editions of Henry Kuttner's Fury (UK hardcover, almost mint - I picked this up in a big batch of Dennis Dobson titles that ended up in the remainder circuit in the early 1980s; I think it must've been sitting in their warehouse for thirty years and it was as fresh as a daisy) and A.E. van Vogt's Empire of the Atom - (Gnome Press edition, if memory serves) sadly, a rather tatty dj but sufficiently complete to be worth having.

SF is about a third of my library; I did my cataloguing over a period of time, mainly by bashing ISBNs into the Amazon search facility in LT and then refining what I found. An almost-forgotten past as a librarian meant that I could make a reasonable stab at searching for many of the books that lacked an ISBN through age or obscurity; and what I couldn't find, I could catalogue reasonably easily. I think all my books and booklets are catalogued now, though it took me something like five years; currently, I'm working slowly through the shelves refining the entries and reconciling what's in the catalogue with what's on the shelf as about 3% of the library got disposed of when I had to downsize my accommodation three years ago. Then there's the magazines and the audio collection. It keeps me happy in the long dark winter envenings...

>26 RobertDay: You are quite right, Light of Other Days. I read it in Robert Silverberg's Science Fictiin 101 anthology.

>14 Cecrow: You were quite right. Kepler-90 turns out to have eight planets. Interesting, for sure; possibly even important. But not up to the sort of hype I was hearing in some quarters.

>26 RobertDay: ... to find Rog and Bill unpacking copies of his brand new novel ready for a signing session the next day

Nice WG anecdote, he's an author I collect and make it a point to get hardbound, but none are autographed and I've never met him.