I'm glad someone else said this because I was right about to. One of the things I love about Rama 1 is how it squashes the idea of a human centric universe where everything has to occur for reasons knowable by us. Rama is truly alien, inscrutable and fulfilling a purpose we don't get to understand. As soon as it enters our solar system, its gone for good, leaving a lot unanswered.

> They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain

The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something.

I enjoyed the sequels but they're a completely separate story to me, and I don't think I'd read them again.

I didn't go in with the expectation that they'd be just like Rendezvous with Rama.

Nah we're not doing prequel hate in 2026

As someone who was saved from reading the sequels due to online warnings, it's good to see that the next generation is being warned off of them also.