Rendezvous with Rama

I was reading this book thinking what Ramans were or what purpose of them was. At first, I thought the Ramans’ purpose would be that they destroy the Solar System, but at the middle of the book, I thought their purpose might be nothing and the Rama would be just tomb. At the ending, I understood my guess was wrong.
My favorite chapter is 9, Dragonfly’s Flight, and 10, The Fields of Rama. In these chapters, the youngest officer, Jimmy Pak tries to explore to the Southern Hemisphere. I guess he would be fearless officer and little bit goofy. He has a sky-bike called Dragonfly and he was proud of his machine, but bringing such as heavy machine was violation. (I can understand his character from this episode.) He flied using the Dragonfly, but suddenly thunder boomed and crashed, and the full power of the electrical storm hit Jimmy. Finally the little sky-bike’s right wing broke off completely and Dragonfly crashed to the ground. I read chapter 9 and 10 very quickly because of the interesting story.
During the story, there are some strange description such as ‘Are we climbing down, or are we climbing up?’, or ‘The strange Cylindrical Sea curved up on either side of the explorers, and over their heads. I imagined those descriptions. To tell you the truth, I want to experience such amazing gravity, although I would feel a little bit fear. I think it would be the same as the world of a scuba diving. In fact, I’ve heard that astronomers practice space activities under water, because the world under water is less gravity like space. When I finished reading this book, some strange experiences in this book inspired me to travel into space some day.

The eye of the Tiger

This story is a kind of suspense. If you like Hollywood's action movies, you would like it.

I was interested in reading about searching treasure under water. For example, they did wreck diving in the beautiful water. In chapter 11, Harry used a explosives to enter the wreck, but for the explosions, a lot of fish died and a shark appeared to eat them. It might be horrible, but I keep my mind to watch a shark such as whale sharks under the water.

About 6 to 10 years ago, I used to dive, because I developed dive computers for my job, so I had to check them by myself. I often went to Osezaki in Izu or Lake Motosu around Mt. Fuji for testing. This story reminded me that Lake Motosu has monument at the bottom of the lake. We hired a professional diver who was a owner of diving shop named GIGI. He used to collect some items from monument. He said those would be Yayoi-Period items.

I like diving in Lake Motosu, because the water transparency is so high that you can see everything well. Plus the water is not sea water, but fresh water, I feel comfortable after diving. Sea water is usually a little bit sticky. And I like watching fish such as eels, carps and crucian carps(Funa in Japanese). There were a lot of findings. For example, an eel escaped backward from the tail fin or carps were swimming in a couple. The best thing I liked was that the world was monotone and very quiet. It's so mysterious that it would be called Wabi-Sabi diving.

15-1. Harry Bruce was Harry’s real name, and Lorna Page was the blonde girl’s name.
15-2. Harry knew Manny well and his eyes were cold and hard.
15-3. She hits Sherry’s face.
15-4. This was the signal Harry planned with Chubby
15-5. They want to escape from Manny.
15-6. There was an enormous explosion.
15-7. He was shot by Resnick’s men in the motor boat.
15-8. Manny Resnick was killed by explosion.

Masao Kuroda