The novel “The Garden of Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee was published for the first time in 1991. It’s the sequel to “Rama II“.

Nicole Des Jardins, Richard Wakefield and Michael O’Toole remained on the enormous alien spaceship called Rama II when it resumed its journey into space leaving the solar system. During the long journey to the Sirius system they have some children but when they arrive they discover that it’s just a relatively brief stop and the mysterious builders have other plans.

A habitat suitable for human beings is built within Rama and the three passengers are asked to record a video to invite Earth to send 2,000 people to build a colony inside it. The terrestrial governments keep the message secret and the settlers think that their mission is to create a new colony on Mars.

“The Garden of Rama” is the second novel that forms a trilogy created by the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee set in the same fictional universe of “Rendezvous with Rama”. In these works Clarke gave mostly ideas leaving the actual work of writing especially to his colleague though on the book covers his name was written in a larger font for advertising reasons.

While “Rama II” marked a new beginning from the original novel setting it decades later, “The Rama” garden directly picks up the story of the previous novel, with the three main characters who stayed on the alien spaceship traveling to Sirius.

The first part of “The Garden of Rama” sums up thirteen years of journey told in the first person by Nicole Des Jardins. It’s above all about her relationship with her two traveling companions, the birth of their children and the strange circumstances in which they raise them until the arrival in what is called Raman Node in the Sirius system.

The three of them find themselves is such a situation that they’re sometimes forced to extreme choices and it seems that the only purpose of that voyage at that speed is to allow Nicole to have some children. In fact it seems unlikely that certain medical / biological tests can be made them only in the Node.

Since this part is told by Nicole, we have only her point of view about the two men. Richard Wakefield feels the burden of the situation and Michael O’Toole seems only interested in religion. For these reasons, in the end this first part is a strange mix of sex and religion.

The story after their arrival at the Raman Node is potentially more interesting, however I think that here start the major problems of the novel. In “Rama II” there was already a deconstruction of the original fictional universe and in the new situation the Earth is all too similar to today’s one, especially regarding the problems and many people’s negative attitudes.

The story of the colony formed inside Rama is conditioned by the fact that the world’s governments seem only interested to get rid of some criminal so they send some of them to be settlers. The result is that only a few of them seem people with a minimum of decency and the colony is run following the lowest human instincts.

The story becomes frankly mediocre because it’s developed in a truly coarse way with characters who act only to create really cheap dramas. With very few changes this part could be set anywhere on Earth and in other eras.

Unfortunately the interesting elements concerning Rama, the Node and other alien species within Rama are secondary in “The Garden of Rama”. This unfortunately makes the reading of the novel particularly frustrating because I found the story as it’s developed not interesting.

Arthur C. Clarke was often criticized for not developing his characters. In the novels of the Rama series written together with Gentry Lee the latter seems to have handled the characters but he did in a way that makes me regret Clarke’s alleged dullness. Because of this choice, the characters introduced in “The Garden of Rama” seem to me rough and I don’t care about what happens to them, another reason why what should be a tragedy just bored me.

Because of its various mediocre and boring elements, in my opinion “The Garden of Rama” is the worst book in the series. It ends with a cliffhanger because it forms a great novel with the next book. If you liked “Rama II” maybe you might like this sequel too.