Rating: 
Summary: If you hate science-fiction, then this is the book for you.
Review: After the first part i.e. Rendevous with Rama I could'nt wait to get my hands on the other parts... and when I did get my hands on them, I wish I had never heard the word 'Rama'. The garden
of Rama was especially bad... full of the worst crap I ever read. I'm pretty sure Aruthur did'nt write most of it if not any of it and it's this
'Gentry' guy who did most of the work..and turned
the original idea ( which was great ) into one long unbelievable soap-opera.
MEDFAZAHM,
Bahrain,
26-6-1997.
Rating: 
Summary: Garden of RAMA
Review: I think this book is above all others. I read a rewiev here that said that Nicole de Jardin was a very extraordinary character. Well, how about Richard Wakefield? He figured out how to program the computer in the Humans nest, and he builds robots as it was nothing. He gotta be very intelligent to make such things... I dont know. Anyway, Garden of RAMA is a very great, fascinating and astonishing and awesome book, real but unreal.... always the mystery: who invented RAMA? and where do the octos and "birds" from? And all other strange things happening... Clarke rules.
I give it the highest rate
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Good.
Review: I would have given this book a 10 if not for the smut in some parts of it. Other than that, it is excellent and exciting. A must for Rama fans
Rating:
Summary: A great SF-novel
Review: It is about a few scientists who investigated a very big ET-ship. They stay on the ship when it goes out in deep space... It's about the amazing adventures in that ship, and how they build an society in the ship with help from the other civilizatio
Rating:
Summary: good book
Review: Great I really liked it. 8>
Rating:
Summary: Terrifically bad writing!
Review: Like many others who've reviewed this un-masterpiece, I expected big things from the sequels to Clarke's classic novel. Realizing that the three sequels were ghostwritten by someone named "Gentry Lee" only diminished my excitement slightly-- that is, until I read the first few pages of "Rama II". Still, I kept with it, hoping that things would pick up after Gentry got all the boring exposition out of the way. Didn't happen.
Now, after reading "Garden of Rama", I realize that I would rather have my fingernails plucked off with a rusty tweezers than suffer through the last installment.
Gentry Lee's writing style is the downfall of these books. It's hard to believe that Clarke would have allowed this hack to massacre one of his finest storylines, but it happened. Lee seems concerned more with creating cardboard cut-out, stereotypical characters, and tossing them into a cheap story to see how much sex he can make them all have. The two main characters, Richard and Nicole, seem to have sex several times a page. I can't figure out whether the spacecraft Rama is an alien experiment to observe humans or just to observe their sexual habits. Additionally, Lee goes waaaay overboard to try to make his non-European characters seem "authentic", e.g. the boring, endless Japanese cultural studies that prop up the character of Kenji Watanabe, who dies before he does anything important anyway; and of course, the accounts of Nicole's ridiculous "spirit journeys" with her tribal people, which I've learned to skim right over whenever they occur.
In all, terrible-- although if you want a manual for how NOT to write, "The Garden of Rama" works for that. I'm giving it two stars, though, because the parts that aren't straight soap opera, the ones that concentrate more on the aliens themselves and their technology, are at least interesting. Not enough to save this poor novel, though.
Rating:
Summary: what's the definition of insanity?
Review: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
And for all intents, since i am going to go for the sequel- I must be insane.
Or not, since I don't really expect it to be better- just some closure.
Garden was better than the the soap opera that was Rama 2 (hence 2 stars), but still a total let down from Rendezvous.
It really bugs me that the people chosen to populate Rama by the government included convicts. I would really think in reality people would be willing to cut off their right arms to be part of something like this and would chosen from the best and the brightest. (And if the analogy is the New World- well, a look at the punishments of colonial times would tell you that the death penalty was a popular punishment for any number of crimes including theft. The colonists took it into accounct that their members incuded criminals.)
Rating:
Summary: High hopes, little substance
Review: I have to say that I found the whole Rama series to be a bit disappointing. I expected a series with the quality of Clarke's "Odyssey" Novels, but they just didn't live up to expectation. There was too many sub-plots and mysteries left un-resolved, events that were over emphasized but never clarified. And to be honest, I found many aspects of the book to be totally unrealistic. Overall this series was quiet a let down. If your going to buy this book, buy if used!
Rating:
Summary: Continuing the downward spiral
Review: Ever so gently this series is starting to drift. GET BACK ON FOCUS!!! Much of the writing was about mundane people doing mundane things, petty conflicts, a lot of wondering and wandering and not much continuity. Once again, as he has done in the past over and over, Clarke comes up with a superlative idea but his literary talents - or lack thereof - are not up to the task. Only rarely does he succeed with character development and this is not an uncommon occurrence among scifi writers. I found myself staring into space several times and even peeking ahead. The best parts were all the creatures in the Garden. It is an axiom that the really memorable science fiction stories do not center on the unworldly aspect but on unforgettable people - Contact, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune. This series could have been really remarkable but it has been dithered away. What a waste of time and energy.
Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment!!!
Review: What a let-down!!! This is an unbelivably poor, hashed-together, novel with a few points of interest (hence 2 stars, instead of 1) but mostly pathetic and unbelivable. The first section of the book, containing extracts of "journal entries" from Nicole's journal (it's obvious now that Nicole is going to be the main character from here on out) which serve to send forward the plot about 13 years (and entangle the characters in some cloyingly obvious sexual "misunderstandings"). The remainder of the book is a description of the "colony" from Earth chosen to inhabit Rama, and the disastrous choices made by nearly everyone -- from the politicians on Earth, to most of the colonists. To paraphrase B.B. King, "The Thrill of Rama is Gone". I'll give "Rama Revealed" a chance, just because so many loose ends are left hanging. A real disappointment.
|
