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| Cover by Stephen Youll |
| RAMA REVEALED Arthur C. Clarke Gentry Lee New York: Bantam Books, 1994 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13: 978-0-553-56947-? | ||||
| ISBN-10: 0-553-56947-3 | 602pp. | SC | $5.99 | |
| Page 13: | "'Did you do all this yourself?' Nicole asked. 'Yep,' Max replied. 'At night... during the last several weeks. I didn't dare ask anybody to help.'" |
| So, during those weeks, Max dug a tunnel several tens of feet long under his barn, dug a room at the end of the tunnel, put in water and sewage pipes, got those services working in the room, installed electrical and communications wiring, and furnished the room. And disposed of the dirt. OK, it was his farm so he could spread the dirt around without leaving clues. And I suppose a case could be made for the dirt being that deep under the farm. But that's a lot of labor for one man over just several weeks, working nights only, while keeping up ordinary activities during the day. |
| Pages 33-4: | "When the New Eden government had requisitioned all the trains to convert the lightweight extraterrestrial alloys into war planes and other weapons..." |
| Indicates no one higher up is watching what goes on in Rama. But this is wrong, as we see later. |
| Page 50: | "They were, of course, compatible, as they had been since the first time they had slept together." |
| Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but I have no idea why Lee thinks it necessary to point this out. Readers know that Richard and Nicole have been living together happily for years, perhaps decades, and have several children. |
| Page 55: | "'If I understand your hypothesis, our current voyage will end at Tau Ceti?' Richard nodded. 'The trajectory is too perfect for it to be a coincidence." |
| How does he know? Also, I thought (based on Rendezvous with Rama) that the Raman space drive affected all mass aboard equally, so acceleration could not be felt. |
| Page 78: | "Richard and Nicole are inviting you and your friends to join them in your old lair in New York, where your parents are living a Spartan but peaceful existence." |
| S/B "spartan". Unless they're prePARing for GLORY!!! |
| Page 94: | "But mostly Richard carried her in a comfortable papooselike contraption." |
| "Papoose" means child. |
| Page 98: | "Max and Patrick both stared in wonder at the twelve huge boilers." |
| Per page 70, these boilers are all of 1.5m in diameter by 5m high. |
| Pages 112-13: | "...a subway sped around a distant corner and headed rapidly toward them, stopping with its front end a meter or so shy of where the spiked corridor continued to descend." |
| The pedestrian corridor intersects the subway tube? |
| Page 235: | "Eight nillets in a feng, eight fengs in a woden, eight wodens in a tert, and eight terts in an octospider day. Richard calculates their day at thirty-two hours, fourteen minutes, and a little over six seconds." |
| So a day is 4,096 nillets long. If a nillet is exactly 28 seconds, the day lasts 114,688 seconds. 1911.466 minutes, or 31.858 hours. Rounded off, its length is 31 hours, 52 minutes exactly. The only way this can be wrong is if the fractional second in a nillet matters. Working backwards, 115,200 + 840 + 6 seconds = 116,046 / 4096 = 28.33 seconds per nillet. I presume this was worked out somewhere in an earlier book in the series. |
| Page 328: | At the Embryo Bank building, an octospider scientist declares that it holds 100,000 species. "Their adult sizes range from a fraction of a nanometer to behemoths nearly as large as this building." |
| Living creatures at sub-nanometer size is hard enough to believe. But ones as big as the Embryo Bank building? No dimensions are given, but it seems safe to assume that's larger than any dinosaur that walked the Earth. Even at Rama's gravity, that strains credulity. |
| Page 407: | ...Dr. Blue explained to her [...] that the containers emptied into the slurry were full of tiny animals that would seek out and kill specific embryos. In that way the octospiders controlled, she said, the exact composition of the next generation, including the number of queens, repletes, midget morphs, and all the other variations." |
| How do these "tiny animals" know the total number of any given variety, to assure they do not kill too many or too few? |
| Page 446: | The vehicle Nicole is riding in is struck by a bomb dropped from a New Eden helicopter. All the other passengers are killed, but she is merely shaken up." |
| It sure is lucky for our side... |
| Page 550: | Saint Michael is described as an android that "looked like a young human priest in his early twenties, dressed in a dark blue robe." Nicole is impressed by the technology. |
| He obviously passes the Turing Test. I wonder if he passes the James Franciscus test. (I refer of course to the star of The Thorn Birds.) No, he doesn't make love to Nicole; that would be too much. |
| Page 555: | Saint Michael: "...each of the Nodes is part of a hierarchical intelligence gathering information throughout this galaxy. Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a single superstation, which we call the Prime Monitor, located somewhere near their center. The set of Prime Monitors was created by God at the same moment the universe began and then was deployed to learn as much as possible about the evolutionary process." |
| So, to take this literally, God knew from the beginning how many galaxies would be formed. |
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