Clarke’s Rama and Lee’s BS
I have been rereading some of the science fiction books that I’ve liked in previous readings. One of them is Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. It’s a series of 4 books, the last 3 being co-authored by Clarke and Gentry Lee. I remember reading the first book, and maybe the 3rd (The Garden of Rama) long back enough to have forgotten most of it, and that essentially meant it was ripe for a rereading.
Rendezvous with Rama is classic sf in Clarke’s unmatched style. The alienness, the unknowableness – of the spacecraft Rama – is what sets this book apart. Indistinguishable from magic, to cite one of Clarke’s own aphorisms.
My advice to you is – do not read the other 3 so-called sequels (Rama II, The Garden of Rama, Rama Revealed). This is not out of a misplaced sense of fanboyism for Clarke’s writing but of some conclusions that I have come to after reading them in sequence. Correction – I had to stop reading the 3rd and the 4th about halfway. The reasons will soon become clear.
The conclusions are these -
- Gentry Lee is nowhere near Clarke – that’s something we all know – and he’s also horribly unqualified to write a Clarke sequel.
- Lee’s prose is full of an overuse of adjectives and everything is extremely verbose. I say Lee’s prose – because Clarke did the editing and made suggestions while the actual writing was done by Lee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#cite_note-5. Sadly, the link cited by Wikipedia is broken, probably caused by a site reorg at syfy.com). People are “listening with rapt attention”, “looking up in awe”, and indulging in excesses of emotion most of the time. Maybe Lee was trying to do something about the critics when they said Rendezvous with Rama did not have good characterization. So he went overboard. Open any page at random of Rama II, read a paragraph and you’ll know what I am talking about. Contrast the clear, concise and at the same time evocative prose of Clarke with the verbiage laden fat volumes of boring sequences that the sequels are.
- Lee is a strongly religious Catholic and he just can’t keep religous nonsense out of his writings. St Michael of Siena, Michael O’Toole, even the name The Garden of Rama (Eden) where the kids are born, the church becoming a strong post-apocalyptic force – the list goes on. You might say that these are merely characters and circumstances he has conjured up to bring variety to the books. Nonsense. Circumstantial necessity is not sufficient justification for this. Let us enjoy Rama in peace, I say. Take your religous symbolism – which the sequels are full of – somewhere else.
The question that I asked myself in the end was this – Why did Clarke collaborate with Gentry Lee at all? Did these things not matter to him? His reasons are not very convincing in Rama II’s preface – “He (Lee) had all the background in celestial mechanics and space hardware to deal with the next appearance of the Ramans”. Is that enough to write good sf? Evidently not.
Clarke did collaborate a lot, and I think most of the time it really didn’t work, especially towards the end when he identified various authors to finish his unfinished works.
Pohl (another prolific collaborator) finished Clarke’s “The Last Theorem” (with a lot of editorial inputs from Clarke), but it feels like the book is broken in the middle, with one part in one story, and the other along a completely different line.
He also collaborated with Lee on ‘Cradle’, which I have not read and won’t, now. This was before Rama 2, 3 and 4. Wonder why he did not see that Lee was a bad choice then.