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jarmer's review against another edition
1.0
VERY weak ending to such an amazing series. The first two books are completely different from the last two.
carterhaskins's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
linnic_'s review
3.0
A strange ending to the series - nothing at all what I would have expected from the mystery and suspense seen in the first book.
The last two books were very focused on Nicole and her life rather than the mysteries of the universe.
I only wish Arthur C. Clarke would have injected more of his unique style and sci-fi focus into it all!
The last two books were very focused on Nicole and her life rather than the mysteries of the universe.
I only wish Arthur C. Clarke would have injected more of his unique style and sci-fi focus into it all!
andre93na's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
afictionalhubbard's review against another edition
3.0
Overall, the series was fairly enjoyable, but the conclusion was a bit of a let down after three thick installments. Many questions were left unresolved, and some of the trite relationships were overplayed at that point. It may have helped if the authors had, instead of glomming onto Nicole des Jardins/Wakefield at the end of the second installment, moved onto other characters, like Michael O'Toole, her daughter Katie, or the Watanabe twins. I would not recommend the series to anyone who is not a die-hard sci-fi nut, as it's just not worth the effort.
tuv's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
matgala's review against another edition
5.0
El primer llibre de Rama va ser molt bo. El segon i el tercer no em van agradar tant, però definitivament va valer la pena arribar fins a aquest últim llibre, que m'ha semblat molt millor que tots els altres.
Conèixer les octoaranyes i la seva societat va ser una part molt interessant del llibre. Fins i tot la part "social" em va semblar molt interessant. El moment en què la Nicole decideix que no vol que l'operin em va emocionar molt.
Em va agradar tornar a saber de la Simone, però no em va agradar el capítol de la Simone. No pel fet del robot, que era una cosa esperable, sinó perquè em va semblar com estrany.
El final de tot em va semblar molt bo. La idea de les llumetes que indicaven les civilitzacions a les galàxies em rodarà un temps pel cap.
M'hagués agradat que hagués deixat més clar qui era la Maria (és descendent de la Simone?) i hi ha una cosa que m'ha trontollat una mica: si les dues naus fan "camins" diferents, i van a diferents velocitats, com és que el temps ha passat de la mateixa manera per les dues naus? No en fa cap esment, i trobo que hagués estat bé.
Però, de fet, el llibre m'ha agradat, i molt!
adunten's review against another edition
5.0
Contrary to the belief of many hardcore science fiction fans, character development is important to the telling of a good story. As much as you need a compelling story, you need compelling characters to live out the story. The genre of “true” or “hard” science fiction tends to be very much event-driven and technology-driven, but there is certainly room for characters with meaningful backgrounds to pull in the reader. When science fiction authors either don’t know how to develop characters or don’t believe in it, the result is a sterile story that doesn’t draw the reader in. As long as the events and the technology are spectacular enough, you can overlook the fact that the story is fundamentally unbalanced, but ultimately the reader is left empty, feeling as no real people participated in the story.
In my opinion, this lack of character development is one of Mr. Clarke’s few drawbacks, and it is apparent in the original Rendezvous with Rama, the story of humanity’s first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, in the form of a mysterious and apparently derelict alien spacecraft. That story is short, written in Clarke’s clean, spare style, rich with visual descriptions and technical detail, but virtually devoid of human interest—and by human interest, I mean the complexities that make humans interesting. The characters have only the most cursory background, and their motivations are either simplistic or never fully explained. They are like ants crawling on the surface of the story, and they’re about as significant as ants. In a story this short and this full of spectacular events and technology, the flaw is easily forgiven, but there is no question it’s still a fundamental flaw… one that has been repeated over and over again by science fiction authors who don’t understand that you can’t have a truly great story of any genre without compelling characters. While I think the original Rendezvous with Rama is still very good, it’s not truly great, due to this flaw. Possibly it could be considered great among science fiction stories, because this problem is so endemic in the genre, but as a pure story, it’s not great. Sorry to all you incensed Clarke fans. I’m certainly not saying all SF authors do this-- a certain Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind—but there’s no doubt it’s a common problem, perhaps connected the prominent role of the short story in the development of the genre. I'm also not saying I didn't like Rendezvous-- I did, I just think it's lacking in certain areas.
Clarke also committed my pet peeve about male authors—the few female characters are always given at least a brief physical description, and it’s generally geared to whether or not she’s sexually attractive, but the male characters remain physically anonymous. We have no idea whether Commander Norton, the nominal main character, is tall, short, thin, muscular, blond, dark—nothing. It doesn’t matter really, because there’s no question that Rama itself is the main character of this book and the humans exploring it are almost incidental.
All this is really background to my real reason for writing this review of the final book in the series, and really of the series as a whole—to illustrate the contrasts between the first book in this series, written solely by Clarke in 1973 as a stand-alone novel, and the three sequels, Rama II, Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed, co-authored with NASA engineer Gentry Lee in the early 90’s. For an engineer, Lee brings a surprising amount of purely human baggage into the picture. His storytelling is as dense, murky, and full of life as Clarke’s is spare and sterile. Whether this is good or bad depends on the reader. A number of other reviewers have moaned and groaned about how bad it is and even described it as a “monstrosity.” Sorry, guys. Humans are messy and they screw things up. I happen to like them anyway.
There is no question that the Rama trilogy (and by this I mean the three books co-authored by Lee) is a story about people. In some respects, it could be considered almost a biography of the main character, Nicole des Jardins, who spends a significant chunk of her life aboard Rama as it leaves Earth’s solar system, and gives birth to five children there. It wouldn’t hurt to subtitle it, “The Adventures of Nicole des Jardins.” In fact, I wonder whether some of the problems male readers have with these books stems from difficulty identifying with the female main character, whose central concerns for much of her life are her children. I personally loved her and was impressed with Lee’s ability to write a remarkable, yet eminently believable woman who is prophesied to “scatter her progeny even unto the stars.” The reader gets to know Nicole from the inside out, and the bond created between reader and character breathes life into the still-amazing events and technology and makes it more real to the audience. Science fiction authors, take note-- I know this character and I care about what happens to her. Science fiction fans, take note-- if you don’t feel like getting to know a given character on a personal level and you just want to read about spectacular places and events without any messy human interaction, you will probably find these books a boring slog regularly punctuated by short episodes of excitement.
These books are also a fascinating (if alternately depressing and uplifting) commentary on the nature of humanity and humanity’s potential place in the universe. Another critical difference between Clarke and Lee is their vision of both human nature and the future, which could be considered the same thing, as one grows out of the other. Although I haven’t read enough of Clarke’s work to make the statement categorically, it seems fairly clear to me that he ascribes to the Star Trek school of thought-- everything is rosy, and humanity has risen up in intellectual glory and mostly conquered its demons. I believe this grows out of his view as humanity as a species well on the way to Enlightenment, and making considerable progress every decade. In contrast, Lee’s “gritty cynicism” worldview dominates much of the background and the middle part of the story, in which the most base and regrettable characteristics of humanity are showcased again and again as the human colony gradually destroys the paradise that was created for them. Greed, suspicion, xenophobia, violence, drug addiction, political maneuvering, prejudice—all are laid bare in the glaring light of Rama. Lee ultimately characterizes humanity as a species only a few steps away from the primordial sea of Earth, and still (perhaps forever) mired in its primitive instincts. What keeps the story from being a complete downer is the tension between the main characters, who represent all that is good, noble, and intellectual about humanity, and the other colonists, as the main characters try to stop the colonists from making a fatal mistake.
Add Clarke’s knack for capturing the continuing thrill of discovery, and there is plenty of adventure and excitement in addition to well-developed characters. Although Lee's vision and writing dominate the story, Clarke's touch is still evident. Two of things I admire most about Clarke are his incomparable imagination for world-building, and his insistence on rigorous application of real science, without making it too inaccessible to the lay reader.
If the writing is somewhat discontinuous in time, it’s forgivable in that the story covers roughly fifty or so years of Earth time—although Earth time is a bit moot, since the characters are traveling at significant fractions of the speed of light. However, the use of viewpoint changes and different writing styles can be jarring as we move from historical overview to Nicole’s personal journal to clinical reports transmitted from the Rama spacecraft to the intelligence that created it.
Ultimately, the story reaches a conclusion that is presented in an overtly religious manner, and as an atheist I’m usually turned off by that. But again, the thrill of discovery was just too much for me, and I loved it anyway, as the nature of the universe was revealed (in a sort of opaque way that is open to interpretation). The story carries strong undercurrents of theology and mysticism, and contains many passages devoted to a new branch of Catholicism and to Nicole’s prophetic dreams and premonitions.
This story made me laugh and cry, which is a rare thing for a science fiction story. It also made me shake my head sadly at the idiocy that can be humanity. At times, it is depressing, almost so depressing that it can be hard to get through, as we are forced to watch the machinations of a power-hungry crime lord tear the space-faring colony apart. But at the end of Nicole’s life, we are left most with a sense of wonder and nostalgia for a life fully lived. Most of all, it made me look up at the stars and wonder anew what’s out there, and will we ever meet it? If we do, what will they think of us?
I must add that I chortled aloud at the small but obvious allusion to Douglas Adams when after a major cosmic revelation, one of the characters wonders, Is the meaning of life no longer 42?
In my opinion, this lack of character development is one of Mr. Clarke’s few drawbacks, and it is apparent in the original Rendezvous with Rama, the story of humanity’s first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence, in the form of a mysterious and apparently derelict alien spacecraft. That story is short, written in Clarke’s clean, spare style, rich with visual descriptions and technical detail, but virtually devoid of human interest—and by human interest, I mean the complexities that make humans interesting. The characters have only the most cursory background, and their motivations are either simplistic or never fully explained. They are like ants crawling on the surface of the story, and they’re about as significant as ants. In a story this short and this full of spectacular events and technology, the flaw is easily forgiven, but there is no question it’s still a fundamental flaw… one that has been repeated over and over again by science fiction authors who don’t understand that you can’t have a truly great story of any genre without compelling characters. While I think the original Rendezvous with Rama is still very good, it’s not truly great, due to this flaw. Possibly it could be considered great among science fiction stories, because this problem is so endemic in the genre, but as a pure story, it’s not great. Sorry to all you incensed Clarke fans. I’m certainly not saying all SF authors do this-- a certain Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind—but there’s no doubt it’s a common problem, perhaps connected the prominent role of the short story in the development of the genre. I'm also not saying I didn't like Rendezvous-- I did, I just think it's lacking in certain areas.
Clarke also committed my pet peeve about male authors—the few female characters are always given at least a brief physical description, and it’s generally geared to whether or not she’s sexually attractive, but the male characters remain physically anonymous. We have no idea whether Commander Norton, the nominal main character, is tall, short, thin, muscular, blond, dark—nothing. It doesn’t matter really, because there’s no question that Rama itself is the main character of this book and the humans exploring it are almost incidental.
All this is really background to my real reason for writing this review of the final book in the series, and really of the series as a whole—to illustrate the contrasts between the first book in this series, written solely by Clarke in 1973 as a stand-alone novel, and the three sequels, Rama II, Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed, co-authored with NASA engineer Gentry Lee in the early 90’s. For an engineer, Lee brings a surprising amount of purely human baggage into the picture. His storytelling is as dense, murky, and full of life as Clarke’s is spare and sterile. Whether this is good or bad depends on the reader. A number of other reviewers have moaned and groaned about how bad it is and even described it as a “monstrosity.” Sorry, guys. Humans are messy and they screw things up. I happen to like them anyway.
There is no question that the Rama trilogy (and by this I mean the three books co-authored by Lee) is a story about people. In some respects, it could be considered almost a biography of the main character, Nicole des Jardins, who spends a significant chunk of her life aboard Rama as it leaves Earth’s solar system, and gives birth to five children there. It wouldn’t hurt to subtitle it, “The Adventures of Nicole des Jardins.” In fact, I wonder whether some of the problems male readers have with these books stems from difficulty identifying with the female main character, whose central concerns for much of her life are her children. I personally loved her and was impressed with Lee’s ability to write a remarkable, yet eminently believable woman who is prophesied to “scatter her progeny even unto the stars.” The reader gets to know Nicole from the inside out, and the bond created between reader and character breathes life into the still-amazing events and technology and makes it more real to the audience. Science fiction authors, take note-- I know this character and I care about what happens to her. Science fiction fans, take note-- if you don’t feel like getting to know a given character on a personal level and you just want to read about spectacular places and events without any messy human interaction, you will probably find these books a boring slog regularly punctuated by short episodes of excitement.
These books are also a fascinating (if alternately depressing and uplifting) commentary on the nature of humanity and humanity’s potential place in the universe. Another critical difference between Clarke and Lee is their vision of both human nature and the future, which could be considered the same thing, as one grows out of the other. Although I haven’t read enough of Clarke’s work to make the statement categorically, it seems fairly clear to me that he ascribes to the Star Trek school of thought-- everything is rosy, and humanity has risen up in intellectual glory and mostly conquered its demons. I believe this grows out of his view as humanity as a species well on the way to Enlightenment, and making considerable progress every decade. In contrast, Lee’s “gritty cynicism” worldview dominates much of the background and the middle part of the story, in which the most base and regrettable characteristics of humanity are showcased again and again as the human colony gradually destroys the paradise that was created for them. Greed, suspicion, xenophobia, violence, drug addiction, political maneuvering, prejudice—all are laid bare in the glaring light of Rama. Lee ultimately characterizes humanity as a species only a few steps away from the primordial sea of Earth, and still (perhaps forever) mired in its primitive instincts. What keeps the story from being a complete downer is the tension between the main characters, who represent all that is good, noble, and intellectual about humanity, and the other colonists, as the main characters try to stop the colonists from making a fatal mistake.
Add Clarke’s knack for capturing the continuing thrill of discovery, and there is plenty of adventure and excitement in addition to well-developed characters. Although Lee's vision and writing dominate the story, Clarke's touch is still evident. Two of things I admire most about Clarke are his incomparable imagination for world-building, and his insistence on rigorous application of real science, without making it too inaccessible to the lay reader.
If the writing is somewhat discontinuous in time, it’s forgivable in that the story covers roughly fifty or so years of Earth time—although Earth time is a bit moot, since the characters are traveling at significant fractions of the speed of light. However, the use of viewpoint changes and different writing styles can be jarring as we move from historical overview to Nicole’s personal journal to clinical reports transmitted from the Rama spacecraft to the intelligence that created it.
Ultimately, the story reaches a conclusion that is presented in an overtly religious manner, and as an atheist I’m usually turned off by that. But again, the thrill of discovery was just too much for me, and I loved it anyway, as the nature of the universe was revealed (in a sort of opaque way that is open to interpretation). The story carries strong undercurrents of theology and mysticism, and contains many passages devoted to a new branch of Catholicism and to Nicole’s prophetic dreams and premonitions.
This story made me laugh and cry, which is a rare thing for a science fiction story. It also made me shake my head sadly at the idiocy that can be humanity. At times, it is depressing, almost so depressing that it can be hard to get through, as we are forced to watch the machinations of a power-hungry crime lord tear the space-faring colony apart. But at the end of Nicole’s life, we are left most with a sense of wonder and nostalgia for a life fully lived. Most of all, it made me look up at the stars and wonder anew what’s out there, and will we ever meet it? If we do, what will they think of us?
I must add that I chortled aloud at the small but obvious allusion to Douglas Adams when after a major cosmic revelation, one of the characters wonders, Is the meaning of life no longer 42?
deltz025's review
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Perhaps the largest departure from Clarke's modus operandi, Rama Revealed makes good on the promise of its title, without damaging the mystique of the Ramans.
mostxlnt's review
3.0
So I've finally finished the whole four-book Rama series, quite possibly for the last time ever. Rendezvous with Rama is still a classic, albeit one that could do without some of the unnecessary personalities clogging it up and which date it terribly. Rama II, The Garden of Rama and then Rama Revealed descend further into silliness via more unnecessary personalities, a few interesting ideas all the way down to This Is God. Good grief.
I'm glad I've read them and glad that they probably made some money for the old guy in his retirement, but basically - for the fans only.
I'm glad I've read them and glad that they probably made some money for the old guy in his retirement, but basically - for the fans only.