Open call for Board Member and Moderator positions in Coin Return. More information here.
Sign up to win MNC Dover's voice! Details here.
Penny Arcade - Comic - Rama Said There’d Be Days Like This
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Rama Said There’d Be Days Like This
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
Unknown User on
+5
Posts
The thing about low hanging fruit is that dogs piss on it.
There are enough of these books that someone has enjoyed them, I'm sure.
I never got very far in because I'm pretty bad at that whole genre.
I don't think you missed much (if you mean "never got very far in" the books). I tried to read the first sequel, which was where Gentry Lee started crapping out his version. It was just so incredibly awful. And though it's taken me many years to realize, I actually have a fairly low bar for being entertained by scifi. Those books should have been perfect for me, as was the original. But I hated everyone involved just a few chapters in - the characters and the author.
It was McDune before McDune.
But man, does he love him some transhumanism.
Didn't know Rama was in the same universe as Twilight.
The Rama sequels get WAY worse than Twilight. Twilight would have been an objective improvement for all characters that don't die in the first book (which is pretty good and a rare dose of human humility for science fiction). It's been probably 25 years since I read them, so my memories are fuzzy but not nearly fuzzy enough:
This guy later falls in love with the woman's youngest daughter in a relationship that is explained in the matter of fact tone in which animes explain that it's technically not creepy at all for the adult main character to be in love with his clearly 12 year old sister.
In one of the later books, a robot of the race that created Rama reveals himself to be the Archangel Michael, and gives the old guy a new plastic body in the image of his younger self to erase the at that point 80ish year age difference between him and his wife.
Meanwhile every other human in the series proves themselves to be closet Nazis who just needed a better excuse than skin color and become so horrible to the other aliens, invading their enclosures within Rama and conquering their villages, that the angel robots decide to sterilize all their captive humans except plastic guy and his child bride and send them to a space gulag.
Keep in mind that the whole premise of the first book was that the alien ship was using Sol as a maneuver point and neither noticed nor cared that Earth was full of apes until they tried to nuke it, at which point it barely noticed but continued to not care. Humans were ants and Rama had more important shit to do than study, let alone destroy them.
The sequels have his name on them but aren't written by Clarke, who's kind of the Tom Clancy of science fiction, not everything with his name on the cover has actually been touched by his hand.
The 2001 sequels also go kind of off the rails, but not nearly as much. In 3001: Final Odyssey a woman with a pet dragon lectures a man from the 20th Century for several pages about circumcision.
A few years ago, I found out that Gentry Lee wrote semi-prequels to the Rama books, Bright Messengers and Double Full Moon Night.
I read the Bright Messengers and it was utter trash. It had full on rape, torture, religious sequences, prosthetic lactating breasts and much more crazy plots. It was so bad the I didn't even attempt to read the sequel.
Double Full Moon Night, from what I read, jumps around a lot and in the end explains why there was a mysterious human family in the Octospider "Zoo" in Rama Revealed. Oh, and something something bad will happen when this small planet's 2 moons both turn Full Moon at the same time...
I persevered with the Rama series, and kept going back to them every few years because it's quite good, yes, it's spoilt a fair bit by all the religion pushed into our faces and the violence in the latter books. It clearly showed that Gentry Lee was the writer and Arthur C. Clarke was supplying the overall plot. I definitely won't be reading any of Gentry Lee solo books.
I meant the game. I'm just bad at those adventure puzzle games in the Myst style. I only read the first couple Rama books.
This thread is telling me I made the right call.
I should not have clicked this spoiler and just left my memories of it as “That one with the generation ship.”
I prefer the comedic anime adaptation "Rama 1/2."
But seriously, yeah, don't read the sequels.
If You Give a Mouse a Rama had some cute illustrations
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead
Rama, life had just begun
But now I've gone and thrown it all away
*deep breath*
Ramaaaaaa, ooOoOooh
The black woman is a rapist who let's an octogenarian marry her underaged daughter, so I give half points at best.
I half did this. I played Starcross (which is just Rama with the serial numbers filed off) long before I read Rendezvous with Rama. And apparently there were at least 3 official Rama games.
Wow I actually know of / watched that one. At least up until the voice actor changes. I like Inuyasha's voice actor but him voicing ranma just takes me out of it too much and doesn't mesh with the character either.
Yeah, I had a similar reaction. He plays Inuyasha more as a surly teenager, and it works, but for Ranma's male form he tried to do a similar voice but a lot more spastic and it just ended up super-grating for me.
The original manga's a lot better than the Ranma 1/2 anime anyway, imho. The main positive of the show was Nabiki being less a villain and more of a trickster; manga Nabs is great for stirring the plot, but the anime version is just a lot more likable. Oh, and the decision to make Ranma's female form a redhead was cute, although it causes a handful of scenes where characters fail to notice the change to no longer make sense.