Rama II: Needs More Apes

It’s taken me nearly 225 pages of Arthur C. Clarke/Gentry Lee’s Rama II to figure out what it is about the book in general that’s rubbing me the wrong way. Here it is:

It’s not science fiction.

At first I thought it was a division between the hard sci-fi that Clarke is known for and the softer version of the genre that’s increased in popularity since the 1970s. You have all the classic elements of soft sci-fi: The touchy-feely with the characters, their inner ponderings, the confusing shifts of narrative tone.

But it’s not that this is soft sci-fi.

It’s that it’s not really sci-fi at all.

Oh, it takes place in Rama II, twin of the anticipated triplets of the first enigmatic spacecraft to sail through the solar system. But it’s not science fiction. It’s science verisimilitude. And for that, I’ve got to blame, well, Gentry Lee.

This is the first Lee book I’ve read, and if it’s indicative of what he writes in general, I won’t be reading any more. He’s taken this not from a scientist’s perspective, nor even from a writer’s perspective, but from an engineering/management perspective and in creating an exciting (I use the term loosely) soap-operatic story filled with dramatic deaths (three so far, completely inconsistent with what Clarke wrote and envisioned in Rendezvous with Rama) that makes this read more like a softie Michael Crichton written-for-Hollywood story than an engaging scientific tale written by a hard sci-fi writer who knows what he’s doing.

Clarke obviously let himself be taken for a ride on this one, which is a pity. (Seems I’m not the only one to think so; Wikipedia’s entry on the books contain a mild rebuke.) Other reviewers are equally disdainful – and, ironically, use some of the same words I have to describe the book. I write this review before I read any other reviews. I promise.)

Lee is too intent in letting us share in the inter-Cosmonaut intrigue than with the mystery of Rama – he tosses in a death or two just to heighten Rama’s mystery, where in the original, Clarke didn’t have to kill off a single astronaut to do so (he put some in peril, but it was more the peril brought on by mankind’s own self-destructive tendencies, as Scott Meyer puts it in his excellent comic, than malevolence on the part of Rama, its biots, or its creators) Lee relies on death as the ONLY plot device to show that Rama II is, indeed, as mysterious as its precedent. That’s cheap writing, in my view.

There are other books in the Rama universe, all written by Lee. I will not be reading them. I like my sci-fi to come with mystery; I don’t need to know everything. Today’s penchant to fill in the backstory is, in my view, annoying. Hoping Peter Jackson et al don’t ruin The Hobbit doing that very thing. Which it sounds like they’re doing, turning a much simpler children’s tale into three, count ‘em, three movies.