As good as the first time? (Rama II - Arthur C. Clarke)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Rama II - Arthur C. Clarke
Date:	17/01/01 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Rama! ACC!

Disadvantages: Too long winded, Not enough Rama "mythology", Nicole Des Jardins

(Totally Updated)

Rama 2 is the follow on to the highly acclaimed "Rendezvous with Rama", a science fiction story dealing with the exploration of an alien spacecraft of gigantic proportions by a small group of human astronauts.

Clarke mentions that further books beyond the original were never planned, and that the last sentence of the original "The Ramans do everything in threes" was simply the best way to end the book, although to me it was pretty inevitable that at least a sequel would be produced. However towards the end of the 1980's, Clarke found that he was short of ideas and returned to the Rama story for inspiriation when he realised it was set up nicely for further explaoration.

For the next three books in this series Clarke has teamed up with Gentry Lee, a writer with whom he'd already co-written the science-fiction novel "Cradle". Gentry Lee had been a senior NASA employee for their Project Galileo and Viking missions. He had also worked with Carl Sagan during the creation of the excellent Cosmos TV series.

=( The bit with the plot )=

As the first Rama spacecraft leaves the Solar System, mankind is already plotting the arrival of at least one further spacecraft, but probably two. It had been seen in the first Rama book that then "Ramans" used triple redundancy and "did everything in threes". It was logical to assume more would follow the first one.

A new deep space radar system called Excalibur, which had been built purey to search for incoming extra-terrestrial life picks up an object in deep space heading towards Earth. In 2197, it was identified as a second Rama ship and this time mankind had years to prepare, rather than months as had been the case before.

A crew of Earth's best was picked and trained to intercept this new Rama craft near Venus at the end of February 2200. This crew would have specialised training and equipment
to help them unlock mysteries that had been left behind by the original crew, and hopefully bring more answers to mankind in their search for other life in the universe.

=( End of the bit with the plot )=

I suppose the obvious question here is "How does it compare to the original?" The asnwer is quite complicated, I'm afraid.

I'm assuming that Lee's influence is the main reason for the huge change in writing style in these newer Rama books. Characters are now flawed to some degree, and indeed I thought Rama 2 was more of a chacter driven book than it's predecessor. I'm all for character development, but in this case the one character I wanted to know more about was the one which was developed the least and that is the Rama 2 spaceship itself.

Most of the dozen or so crew members is given detailed background describing personality and history. In fact, you're nearly 120 pages into the book before the crew even arrives at Rama. This is nearly a quarter of the entire book which weighs in at around 500 pages (including Clarke's afterword). I thought a lot of the character development was superfluous, and at least one of the main characters is too good to be true.

Some of the dialogue was particularly weak considering the chacter development, probably an indication of scientists trying to be writers.

The biggest downside to the story was the fact that the personal interactions of the crew are seemingly more important than unlocking further Rama mysteries. The background to the story focuses on the personal battles for fame and power that are constantly running in the background due to most of the crew being "hired" by a media conglomerate for post-mission consultation in a huge Rama project.

While it was good to see modern themes invade Clarke's work, and at least some of the crew members showed flawed personality traits, I kept thinking that I wanted to le
arn more about Rama itself. In fact, I came to the conclusion that the Rama setting was totally wasted on what I considered to be a story about human greed.

Having finished the book, I was quite disappointed. I didn't learn that much more about the Rama spacecraft (which was my primary reason for reading the book), the main character of Nicole Des Jardin just annoyed me by being practically flawless (a single mother with complicated half French, half African roots, the father of her child is the future King of England. She's a doctor, astronaut and Olympic champion) and the most of the other crew annoyed me by reacting to situations in strange ways contrary to their supposed personalities.

It's hard to recommend this book, although I got enough out of the Rama part of it to stop it being a complete waste of time, I don't think this would apply to most other people. It's also not a standalone story, and continues onto the third and fourth parts of the Rama series which I was also disappointed in.

Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee
Published by:Orbit.
ISBN: 1857231937
Price: £6.99

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