Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

NOTE: I did not finish this book yet, this review will explain why, but the short version is the book was awful. Rendezvous with Rama may be one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke books. It's just amazing, hard science fiction where the only important star is an asteroid in outer space, and the scientists who are working on it are bland uninteresting automatons. But after reading that book the one thing I would NEVER have asked for is more information on the back story of the characters. Laura Ernst was a Surgeon and a Commander. Guess what? That's all you need to know, is she good? Well yeah I'm sure she was, she was on the ONLY space mission to a major asteroid find near Earth. Then over 10 years later Rama II comes out and just makes you appreciate the original more. Arthur C. Clarke's name is still on it in huge letters, with Gentry Lee following it up. But after reading half the book it's clear Arthur C. Clark did nothing for this book, and Gentry Lee's contributions took over. No longer do you have the terse hard science of the book, and instead you get.... drama!!!! Instead of these one dimensional characters (which again was perfectly fine in the first book) you get a ton of personality. In fact the only character that has no personality in the book is the asteroid itself. The entire focus of the book, the major location, has no personality. They spend 10 pages of back story of one character meeting the pope and learning about a saint, and they spend about 1 page to say "It's the same as the first asteroid". Over 30 percent of the book (the first 30 percent mind you) is about everything that happens before the space mission, and here's the thing... none of it is interesting. Period. I don't care about person A. interacting with person B. I don't care about a fight. I don't care about a bad/good mother, or her king baby daddy. I don't care about ANY of it, because guess what? That's not important when discussing the asteroid. The only important character doesn't appear for the first third of the book. So when the asteroid finally is reached, there's a lot more questions. It appears that at least 3 characters are unstable, two of them have a fight days before the launch... over a third. And somehow we're supposed to believe the expedition didn't have backups for all of these people. One character has robots who perform shakespeare.. ON A SPACE SHUTTLE which probably cost millions of dollars to transport anything into space? In fact many of the characters and decisions of that space shuttle just don't make sense. But the worst is the mysteries. There's mysteries which are painfully obvious. Person A has a problem, person B gave them wine the night before. Person C remembers both facts but doesn't seem to put it together. Then Person B also gave drugs to someone who was acting erratic. and drugs to a third person..... really? The exposition of the poisoning is even worse. The character of Fransesca Sabatini may set women 300 years back in the book (the good news is there's in the years 2000 so she'll only reset us about 100 years). She's promiscuous, she's conniving, it's clearly she's got everyone under her finger, she sleeps with someone just because she can. She made a couple famous documentaries, one major one on sex. and then when you have all that, out of no where she drops a story about how multiple different people molested her. One against her will then the next as a way to get away from it. And this develops her character how? It's clear the author is trying to build her into being a strong female role model, except that she uses sex as a weapon, she is to blame for at least two deaths so far, she wants to "take care of a third". Her personal opinions on sex are questionable at best, and her backstory is just... ugh. She's not the only bad character. You have a single track mind on one of the scientists (you know the people who normally are slow to act and put their hypotheses to the real test), another female character who acts more like columbo than the doctor she's supposed to be? ("I could dump the biological data that takes 45 seconds, but instead I'm going to go take a nap... hope that doesn't get anyone killed") The shakesphere guy who honestly could be the most interesting guy, A famous Raman scholar who... gets ignored all the time, and so on. In fact there's not a single character I could really call "good", and the only one I wanted to read about is non existent. You are on the most wonderful and fanciful thing to EVER happen to human kind and we're spending time talking about molestation, and petty fights? We're spending time on mysteries? We're spending time with a crew that is so dysfunctional the question needs to be repeatedly ask "WHO APPROVED THESE PEOPLE?" There's at least 6 out of the 12 people in the story who should not be on the space shuttle for any reason. It's not like they couldn't find others to replace them. They specifically mention one character having a backup if his secret getting out. But somehow they all got on the space shuttle together? Save yourself some time. Read Rendezvous with Rama twice, because honestly the first half of this book is so bad it is unlikely I ever even attempt to read the second half. There's no hard science here. There's only a horrible sequel to what was one of the best unsolved mysteries in science fiction of our time.