Rama Revealed: The Ultimate Encounter - Hardcover

Rendezvous with Rama didn't need sequels, but we got them anyway. Now, billed as the final installment in Clarke and Lee's overextended, meandering space odyssey (The Garden of Rama, 1991, etc.), the vast spaceship Rama finally arrives--not back at Earth but at Tau Ceti--and the mysterious super-robot, Eagle, provides some explanations. Many of the characters from previous volumes recur, and the story picks up where Garden left off. Nicole, trapped by the dictatorial regime that now rules Rama's human colony, is contacted by some tiny robots sent by her husband, Richard, whom she had thought to be dead, to arrange for her and selected others to escape. They soon come into contact with the octospiders--friendly, peaceful, advanced aliens with whom Nicole's group learns to coexist and cooperate and whom they eventually come to understand. But then the dictator Nakamura discovers their whereabouts and begins a war of extermination. Richard and an octospider volunteer to try to dissuade Nakamura, but both are killed after interrogation. Finally, as the octospiders reluctantly prepare a devastating retaliation, the Eagle intervenes, ending the war and dividing the humans into two groups, those that can live among aliens and those that can't. As for the Ramans--well, the explanation subsides into flatfooted religiosity and doesn't really bear close examination. A tedious, lumbering ox of a conclusion, hard-working but poorly structured and unconvincingly presented; the aliens look funny but aren't really alien. Still, there will be hordes of Rama fans desperate to discover how it all comes out. (First printing of 100,000) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The fourth and presumably final volume of a saga that began with Clarke's now-classic Rendezvous with Rama continues where The Garden of Rama left off, recounting man's extraordinary adventures inside a trio of colossal, pre-programmed, alien starships. After a third identical Raman spacecraft has appeared near Earth and retrieved a contingent of humans for a voyage to the stars, the resulting colony of New Eden spawns a ruthless dictator named Nakamura, who condemns the former governess to death for treason. Only hours from execution, Nicole Wakefield ingeniously escapes to join her husband outside the settlement where, along with other members of their family, the pair eventually befriends and learns to communicate with the bizarre creatures called octospiders. Meanwhile, perceiving only threat to his regime, Nakamura launches a war against the octospiders that the Wakefields are powerless to stop, and the Raman-bred diplomat known as the Eagle must return to intercede and shut the operation down. Readers hoping for a dramatic final confrontation with the starships' creators may come away somewhat disappointed, although a further adventure in the series is not ruled out. Fans of skillfully crafted hard sf, however, will find plenty of Clarke and Lee's fascinating scientific speculations vividly given form in the marvels of Raman technology. Carl Hays