Review of Rama Revealed

One of the great things about Arthur C. Clarke's fiction is its intimations of a controlling purpose to life, the universe and everything. Call it destiny or deity, it is there in most of his work. In "Rescue Party", for example, the rescuers speak of "unknown powers" who "folded the time barrier around the universe." Childhood's End goes a little farther, positing an "Overmind" that tells the star-travelling Overlords what it wants done, and they doeth it. But Clarke was always careful not to get too detailed about this ultimate authority. In Childhood's End we see that the Overmind has awesome powers,1 but we learn next to nothing about its nature or purpose. That's the way it should be.

A Rendezvous with Rama is one of Clarke's masterpieces.2 However, it avoids the teleology entirely.3 In the year 2130, when humanity has developed the ability to routinely travel the solar system, an object is detected hurtling inward toward the Sun. Telescopic observations show it to be a giant cylinder — clearly artificial. Of course an expedition is mounted. They find a way inside and encounter many mysteries. The novel's final sentence tantalizes us with the implicit promise that we will learn more about these mysteries.

Indeed we have. The Rama concept, in fact, has become a cottage industry for B. Gentry Lee, a spacecraft engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He and Clarke collaborated on four novels: Cradle, Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed. Lee wrote Bright Messengers by himself; it was published in 1995.

Reaction to these collaborative Rama novels is very much a mixed bag. I have heard that many people don't like them at all.4 I was prepared to dislike this one, but having read it I cannot. It tells an engrossing tale which holds together pretty well, and the characters and environments are well-conceived. Its main shortcoming is that it comes down too heavily on the religious aspect. Near the end of the book its main character, Nicole, meets St. Michael, who tells her that the Nodes and the various spacecraft are part of a system feeding data to Prime Monitors which God (he uses that name) introduced into our universe at the moment of the Big Bang.5 God's aim is to discover the factors which produce a perfectly harmonious universe. I knocked the book's rating down two notches because Gentry Lee (a Catholic, who did most of the writing) skated too close to doctrine for my taste. There are also minor continuity errors, detailed on my Errata page. The bottom line: It's a workmanlike but not exceptional novel.

1 We do learn that it is not omnipotent, for it needs the Overlords to prepare the races for its contact with them.

2 For years, I heard rumors of a movie version in development. But this apparently never managed to pull together the necessary financing.

3 Perhaps not entirely. There are "Cosmo Christers" who think the Rama spacecraft is a spawn of Satan. One of their more dedicated believers rides a 1,500-MT hydrogen bomb out from Mercury, intending to blow Rama up if the humans do not leave it and have no further interaction.

4 Perhaps the most commmon complaint is that Lee makes his sex scenes too explicit. Longtime Clarke fans would certainly object to that. There is one sex scene in this book and, yes, it is quite explicit. But I feel that the context demands that. So, while it would have worked as well if toned down a bit, I can't fault Lee on this basis.

5 Saint Michael: "The set of Prime Monitors was created by God at the same moment the universe began and then was deployed to learn as much as possible about the evolutionary process." (page 555)

RAMA REVEALED Arthur C. Clarke Gentry Lee New York: Bantam Books, January, 1995				Rating: 4.0 High
ISBN-13: 978-0-553-56947-?
ISBN-10: 0-553-56947-3	602pp.	SC	$5.99

RAMA REVEALED

Reviewed 10/28/2011