[ternus]

DO NOT READ THE SEQUELS

One of the few cases where they actively ruin the first book, to the extent you take them as true sequels. Clarke basically licensed his name and plot to Gentry Lee, who proceeded to ruin the sense of wonder by explaining everything, often in deeply unsatisfactory ways. They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

Star Wars prequel/sequel situation.

[amiga-workbench]

I'm glad someone else said this because I was right about to. One of the things I love about Rama 1 is how it squashes the idea of a human centric universe where everything has to occur for reasons knowable by us. Rama is truly alien, inscrutable and fulfilling a purpose we don't get to understand. As soon as it enters our solar system, its gone for good, leaving a lot unanswered.

[qubidt]

> They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain

[CamouflagedKiwi]

It's been a long time now, but from what I remember, you're not wrong. It's often a mistake to try to explain too much in sequels, which they certainly do.

Also they seemed to have a weird obsession about who was going to have sex with who to minimise inbreeding in the next generation. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by not remembering so well, but I recall that seeming pretty weirdly prominent.

[arjie]

The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something.

[shiroiuma]

Are you talking about the same Rama sequels by Gentry Lee?

I admit it's been a long time since I read them (maybe 20 years), but I certainly don't remember anything quite like this. I remember it more like the other poster here said: they basically said everyone was corrupt. In a nutshell, Rama comes back to Earth with instructions that a bunch of humans need to come aboard to live out their lives there. But instead of sending their best, some parts of Earth send their worst: criminals and such. So pretty quickly there's several different "cities", with one of them basically run by some crime boss. One of the main characters' daughters gets involved with the crime boss somehow and murders him before killing herself, as payback for killing her father. Later, the human habitat goes to war with the aliens in one of the other habitats, because the humans had broken through to their side and invaded them for some reason I forget. There was even one plot point that the father had hacked into the ship's environmental controls because the humans insisted on having wood-burning fireplaces, even though this messed with the environmental control systems. Instead of just not burning fires, the basically forced him to change the system to accommodate their fireplaces.

But I don't remember any sex slaves. Maybe I forgot that part.

[arjie]

All right, I think perhaps then I'm smearing all the sci-fi books I read in my teenage into one. Thanks.

[pndy]

Perhaps you mixed plots together. "Rama II" takes on expedition to the second ship which ends with 3 people being trapped inside and put on a journey outside solar system. Then "The Garden of Rama" describes how these three had to adapt to life on the alien ship. There happens the plot where the main character Nicole has 5 kids, 3 girls with one man and 2 boys with another. First part is written as her journal, then book continues normal narration and focuses on second ship reaching the destination and reasons why they were bought there in the first place. Then, plot with return to the solar system happens where other people were boarded in secrecy on third ship. And it at some point revolves around Nicole's daughter who lives a destructive life.

Unlike others in this comments tree, I liked the other books. These go against the typical space exploration journey where you have humans on their ship surrounded by technology they're familiar with and on which they can fully rely. Here, characters are uncertain of their future - they don't know where they're going, have to adapt to the surroundings, discover the unknown and face downsides of human beings. There's none of that familiar splendor of "going boldly where no man has gone before" or heroic actions, great fights in the outer space. Lee's contribution shows us as small, even unsuited to live among others - here and there.

On the other hand, I'm not fond of his other books where he tried to continue this universe: "Bright Messengers" and "Double Full Moon Night". These felt like distilled, fast-tracked version of "Rama" with more religious overtones because of two characters included.

---

Clarke's own books and these which he co-wrote with other authors have potential for adaptations for the big and small screen. "Rama" series taken by good writers and directors could become a new hit comparable to "Lost" show - which if you stretch some things, feels somehow similar.

[pavlov]

> “the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something”

Sounds like Tolstoy…

[m4rtink]

Yeah, the sequels really were very different and in hindsight not very good. Not to mention kinda too forcefully trying to show how almost everyone is a a corrupt asshole - both humans and large ass well as those almightly aliens sending the Rama craft so they can basically keep samples of sentient population as pets. :P

Yeah, really the original Rama book was it - just image how sequels to the Matrix movie would look like, those could have been even worse!

[phendrenad2]

As someone who was saved from reading the sequels due to online warnings, it's good to see that the next generation is being warned off of them also.

[ternus]

They have something like 2 stars on Goodreads. Imagine that as a fairly accurate product review score - if they were Amazon products, they'd be somewhere between "obviously counterfeit" and "burned my house down."

[kryptn]

I enjoyed the sequels but they're a completely separate story to me, and I don't think I'd read them again.

I didn't go in with the expectation that they'd be just like Rendezvous with Rama.

[sbinnee]

Lucky for me I didn't read the sequels. I had my own theories about the purpose of Rama. Some theories are best left as theories in your heads to fuel ideas and imagination.

[m463]

It's kind of strange to me that the classic scifi books I read in my youth had few if any follow-ons, and in this case had to resort to other writers to happen.

Meanwhile, many books I read nowadays on kindle routinely have 8 books in a series.

I wonder what makes this happen? Is it that self-publishing that just spits things out with less friction? Less editing and/or second guessing? AI helping? Expectations?

[MBCook]

I didn’t even know they existed until this article mentioned them.

I felt similar about the recent authorized sequel to Andromeda Strain.

It didn’t feel like the same universe to me. More like someone was told the book flap description of the first book and a few character names and just wrote from there.

[ternus]

There's a sequel to Andromeda Strain? ... Yeah, better off forgetting this information.

[ASalazarMX]

Or do read them, but expect something different than the first book. Gentry Lee has a wilder imagination that Clarke, and once you realize it isn't Clarke, it's enjoyable in its own way.

[rhyperior]

TBH I’m not sure I’ve read anything from Gentry Lee that I really loved.

[tehnub]

Nah we're not doing prequel hate in 2026