Bright Messengers by Gentry Lee

I had read and, much to my surprise, enjoyed the Clarke/Lee Rama sequels (even though my review of the second sequel. Garden of Rama, is just four words long: “Get on with it.”); so I was interested when a client passed on to me this book and its sequel. It was a disappointment.

The book was written in 1995 and set in 2141. But you wouldn’t know because the main characters – including the aliens – appear to have the same mind-set as contemporary characters of the middle 1990s. The only exception to this is one minor character who describes himself as ‘a British Catholic from Londonderry”. I don’t know if that’s an attempt to show social attitudes changing, or just carelessness on the part of the author, because everyone else has attitudes that appear old-fashioned to us now.

In particular, at one point the aliens controlling the artificial world that the characters find themselves in subject them to an object lesson on the Holocaust. The fact that one of the main protagonists is (a rather unconvincing) German appears to be the main reason for this; but I still asked myself “Why?”. The Raman aliens – as we assume them to be – seem to be exercised about something that happened 200 years in the past, and Johann, the German protagonist, seems badly affected by this. Given that the present generation of Germans don’t feel any element of guilt over what their grandfathers and great grandfathers did, I could not believe that this would be an issue that far into the future.

I also have a problem with the novel’s religious stance. Not with the religion as such; it’s up to the writer or the reader what they personally choose to believe or doubt – but there seems to be a major shortfall in scientific rigour when a range of characters, many of whom claim to be scientists or otherwise rational people, encounter sparkling motes that seem to display organisation and self-volition, and all jump to the conclusion that these must be angels. Only about a third of the way through the book does any character even begin to doubt this view. Obviously, the standard of scientific scepticism is due to decline over the next 175 years.

The one well-drawn character is highly unlikeable, and although he is not the only Muslim in the character list, his fellow Muslim is a thinly-drawn person with little or no substance and next to no role in the action. By contrast, Yasin is drawn as a villain from the outset, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is deliberately made into an unsympathetic character.

The fate of Sister Beatrice is pretty obvious and I saw it coming a few pages out, leaving the Johann character with a new-born child for whom the aliens provide him with what can only be described as a set of strap-on comedy breasts.

I shall be interested to see if the sequel improves, or if it makes any connection with characters and situations from the original Rama novels, because for the most part there is little such connection.

Double Full Moon Night by Gentry Lee

The function of Rama, the alien artefact first encountered in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama and expanded upon in a series of sequels written by Clarke and Gentry Lee,  is nowhere near as clear as the function of this novel and its prequel, Bright Messengers, and that is to give us the back story of the child Maria, found abandoned in the closing stages of Clarke and Lee’s Rama Revealed.

However, by the time we find that out, it is likely that all the reader’s patience with this exercise will have been exhausted. Bright Messengers at least had the benefit of two strong (if barely credible) characters, Beatrice and Yasin. One was impossibly good and competent; the other was highly unlikeable and showed no evidence of the advance of human thought or emotional development in 150-odd years. This book has no interesting characters, and the events just meander on to set up the characters and the situation. The last thirty-five pages catapult the action forward to the setting of Rama Revealed without any preamble; I had to refer back to the earlier book to establish what was going on, and even then there were no real answers. (It may even be that these 35 pages were excised from Rama Revealed by a wily editor…)

I had the feeling that the author was just writing the novel in the form of an outline to get to the ending that he visualised, because many events and personal relationships are just told almost in the sense of a history book. There are big info-dumps to move the action on, and mostly these just introduce yet another alien creature that is given a silly name. Throughout, the author’s own personal religious viewpoint is barely disguised; there are sections that read like some sort of moralistic tract; and there is a recurrent theme of older men being offered polyamorous sex with much younger women. As Ian Fleming said, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence but three times….

Readers wanting more insight into the Rama universe will find nothing new here. And I doubt that there are sufficient readers with such a great involvement with the Rama universe who will care that much about the back stories of characters introduced towards the end of a different novel five years earlier.