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Rendezvous with Rama

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Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#91

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

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 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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#92

Post by shagie »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
shagie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of my early renderings Renderman (high school), Povray (college), and Art ( https://www.abemegahed.com/software/ - at the very end) were trying to visualize the scale of Rama and Ringworld. The scale of it was... well... astronomical.

Some of the ringworld covers were quite good.

One of the things that I recall from that (and written about elsewhere... though I don't recall where) is that the shadows of the shadow squares, when viewed from the surface all subtend the same angle on the Arc of Heaven.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#94

Post by eszed »

cal_dent wrote: post #68
the_biot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love "Songs of Distant Earth", I suspect a Hollywood version of it would amount to "giant lobsters vs space marines", whereas in the book they're a minor sideshow.

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#95

Post by m4rtink »

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…

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!

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#96

Post by sbinnee »

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…

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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#97

Post by Sharlin »

ggm-at-algebras wrote: post #19
Analemma_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Officially, all the Rama sequels were co-authored by Clarke and Gentry Lee. Clarke claimed that Lee did virtually all the writing and he was only a consultant, although AFAICT the only source for this claim was in an interview many years after they were published, presumably after Clarke was aware of their negative reception, so who knows how much of that is true vs. reputation management. But yeah, they're awful. I…

It would seem passing strange that Gentry Lee came up with all the awful bits and the consulting oversight didn't.

The terrible bits were all stuff that Clarke never wrote in any of his solo novels.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#98

Post by whatisthiseven »

If you want to listen to the audiobook Rendevous with Rama, I strongly recommend against the version as narrated by Peter Ganim. One of the worst narrators. His pacing is so bad it sounds like he is inserting periods into the middle of sentences. By the end his cadence improves, but it seriously made me stop listening to the story multiple times because of the poor narration.

Which is a shame, because the story is great. The "aha"! moment the ending gives is a huge rush.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#99

Post by shiroiuma »

arjie wrote: post #47
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…

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 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.

Re: Rendezvous with Rama

#100

Post by shiroiuma »

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 jockeys have been through with it

It's being helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the guy who did Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and the new Dune movies. If anyone can do a good job with it, he can.

>For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts,

Don't forget Villeneuve's "Arrival".

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