Here's a brief story about his interest background. It begun since God knows when, as a child, this boy named Rhama had a great interest in the sky especially when the sun had descended in the far west and illuminates dusk sky with the numerous twinkling stars, planets and moon. Often when the lights went out due to an electrical error, this boy ascended the roof of his house, sit on the clearest and highest spot and mesmerizing the work of God represented in the vast black sky above his head.
However, as days grows old and his mind get anchored to the so-called ground named reality the interest has been left untamed, and ultimately buried. This was happened 5 years ago when he decided to attend the Faculty of Computer Science instead of Faculty of Astronomy. But the dream, the interest buried and untamed as it was never killed nor it get diminished from his concsciusness.
Compelling to his love in works of literature and its many form of manifestations (such as movies, and books) he begun to regrow the dream. As he read many works that tell tall-tales about space exploration especially by this man, Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, he begun to open his eyes yet again, jerked off his head to the back and observe the beautiful yet untamed dream he had left few years ago.
"The Fountains of Paradise", was the first to open his eyes. In the novel, Sir Clarke describing about space-elevators the new means to travel to the space with the cost only fractions of what it originally takes when travel using the current means. At first, he decided that the works was a pure fictional imagination of one certain enius. He left it stored in his brain-cell intended to save it for a pure information purpose only.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" was another in which he felt so close to the giant planet in the solar system named Jupiter, a giant mass of gas with no solid surface and 9 times gravity higher than the Earth. He never travel the sky, he didn't know what it feels like to float in the zero gravity environment, he couldn't even imagined being alone in the vastness and emptiness of the open space but the Jupiter described in the novel force an urge within his desire to squeak through the gas cloud and eternal storm that forms the eye of the Jupiter and to observe what was beneath the heavy cloud blanket of Jupiter. It was so magnificent, magmanous to him and so it begun another path of his life open to be considered to take.
For the weeks that had passed, he did his homework rather well, he learns more about the Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. He had read every article in the National Geographic magazines that had to do with the space environment. And ultimately, he felt like he could do some research, uses his imagination, explore his un-exercised creative mind to be a science-fiction writer as he observes none of the current writer in Indonesia dares to touch with the subject.
"Rendezvous with Rama" was the next novel from Sir Arthur C. Clarke that waiting in top of his list to read. And he is more than ready to once again explores the unknown universe beyond the atmosphere of our puny Earth.