Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rendezvous with Rama

blog.engora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 124 posts

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#101

Post by ufmace »

dbspin wrote: post #58
pavlov wrote: post #22

I always thought that, out of the Clarke novels, “Songs of Distant Earth” would make a good movie adaptation. Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.) For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts, Lem’s “Solaris” still holds its own, and the Tarkovsky movie is i…

Counterpoint, I very much enjoyed the sequels (all but the last). They added three dimensional characters, especially women and explored a variety of aspects of first contact. They're a believable examination of how humans recreate the same social ills over and over, given the opportunity for utopia.

I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.

Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#102

Post by MBCook »

ternus wrote: post #34

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 pr…

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#103

Post by MBCook »

shiroiuma wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #22

I always thought that, out of the Clarke novels, “Songs of Distant Earth” would make a good movie adaptation. Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.) For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts, Lem’s “Solaris” still holds its own, and the Tarkovsky movie is i…

>as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.) This is not necessarily a bad thing. Others have noted that a faithful adaptation would have been a snooze-fest and inconsistent at best. There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it. >Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jocke…

> There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.

Yeah. The idea of the genetic dynasty with brothers Dawn/Day/Dusk, as well as how Demerzel fits in has been pretty great, and none of that was in the novels.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#104

Post by MBCook »

hermitcrab wrote: post #84
selcuka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clarke was accused, credibly, of being a pedophile Genuinely curious, where does the credibility come from? As far as I can remember it turned out to be an outright slander by a tabloid paper.

It is covered a bit here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/sep/12/sciencefiction... No idea if he was as much of an insufferable egomaniac as that article makes out. Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing. Hopefully we are a bit more enlightened now.

> Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing.

Yeah that’s still a thing, unfortunately.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#105

Post by ternus »

MBCook wrote: post #102
ternus wrote: post #34

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 pr…

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.

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

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#106

Post by ternus »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #55
ternus wrote: post #34

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 pr…

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.

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."

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#107

Post by rhyperior »

ternus wrote: post #34

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 pr…

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

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#108

Post by arjie »

shiroiuma wrote: post #99
arjie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fir…

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…

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

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#109

Post by m463 »

ternus wrote: post #34

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 pr…

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?

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#110

Post by cal_dent »

eszed wrote: post #94
cal_dent wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree. I've always thought it would work well as a TV show in the more heady days of streaming (let's say 2012 - 2020) when networks and studios where it still felt like they had some room to take more risk. It's more towards the end of the last TV "golden age" but an adaptation like something like Apple's take on "Tales from the Loop". Not brash or loud or too formulaic but somehow still got made

I loved "Tales From the Loop", and wished they'd made more. It has a kind of atmospheric sensibility that sticks (with me, at least) long after the details of the plot are forgotten. That's appropriate, I guess, for something based on a portfolio of paintings. It's a hidden gem that I enjoy recommending.

Yes! Amazing show, one of my favourite shows of the last decade or two. I think what really does it for me is that they really bring the audience into the world itself. I think that's partly because there's no need to always be pushing the plot forward, which I think is a bugbear of mine of newer shows now. There's something to letting things just breathe and tales from the loop really excels at that.

The Phillip Glass soundtrack particularly elevates it too.

Post reply on HN