By the year 2130, the solar system has been colonized, with humans living on planets ranging from Mercury to the moons of Neptune. Despite so much expansion and discovery, there have been no signs of intelligent life besides our own Earth-born. Until Rama.

Weighing more than ten trillion tons, smoothly shaped, and racing towards the sun at astonishing speed, Rama was no natural object, but clearly an interstellar spacecraft. It appeared to be on course to loop around the Sun, but at a dangerously close orbit. After Commander William Tsien Norton makes the tricky landing of his ship Endeavor on the edge of the colossal craft, he discovers an airlock. Awaiting him on the other side of that portal is a historical moment not experienced since Pizzaro met the Incas or Howard Carter peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen--the a long-hoped-for, but also long-feared encounter with a visitor from beyond the stars.