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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I loved Rendevous With Rama, and this one is good, but not as good. The giant alien spaceship with its human tag along passengers is still going somewhere, for some reason. The passengers try to figure out how to get along with the aliens aboard, and how to relate to the giant spaceship/world. Still exciting and interesting. ( )My earlier comments on 'Rama II' apply here; once again, despite the extreme length and tediousness of this novel, I found myself identifying with the characters, much to my surprise. Indeed, towards the end of the book, when the main protagonist knows she will face her inevitable death on the morrow, and her handicapped son asks her to 'tuck me up in bed once more, the way you did when I was a child', I wept for the awful sense of impending loss in that exchange, and that is why I shall defend this book. But not too strongly. It is a shaggy God story; we are promised revelations and none arrive; and the journey to get to this point has been so very, very long. How do you ruin a great idea? Find another author, destroy the original idea, turn it into a social commentary that seems completely out of place, and wrap all these things into two novels. This is what the end to the Rama series seems like. What started as a great and wonderfully original idea, turned into something that was at best comically bad and at worst a disgrace to the wonderful name of Arthur Clarke. Rama Revealed was the nail in the coffin of the once great Rendezvous with Rama. I can still read Rendezvous with the same joy that I did originally, but I know that in the end there is no wonderful sequel, just these three stories that seem lost and out of place. From Rama II to Garden of Rama to Rama Revealed, it just gets worse. Only an incorrigible optimist (like me) could read them all. If you haven't bought it, spend the money on beer, give it to a beggar, whatever. If you have it, don't waste your time reading it: do something useful, or watch Plan 9 from outer space again instead. Interesting sci-fi scenery. Slow, artificial, too american-happy-family dialogues, too sentimental also. Too much religious crap at the end.
Only readers who are genuinely curious about the nature of the Rama enterprise and the mysterious intelligences behind it will find reason to struggle through this inert narrative.
References to this work on external resources.
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:53 -0400)
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