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RAMA REVEALED is the 3rd and final volume of the Gentry Lee-written sequels to RAMA, the sci fi classic. Clarke must have been inspired. Lee starts off uncertain, hesitant before the great master, and then finds his own voice. an accomplished style and structure piece becomes an extended quasi-literary examination of the US aerospace subculture ca. 1991.

this means a couple of things. like a lot of books written 1989-1991, Japan is front and center on people's minds. (Crichton's DISCLOSURE, Tom Clancy's DEBT OF HONOR, for example). the "Enemy" even goes so far as to affect a shogun costume, which I don't know would go over amazingly well even with a bunch of SoCal youth. yet somewhere in the boozy, THC-ridden atmosphere, there's a fair wrap-up of the Lee characters, including the in estimate Nicole des Jardins, half-black half-French adventurer, ex Olympic athlete, and basically, savior of mankind.

(I guess it at least bears noting that Jung would probably have seen the des Jardins character as the 'anima' of Gentry Lee. instead of pale-white aerospace engineer, black female athlete. confront the anima, says Jung, is the masterwork of a life)

all in all some problems having to do with human intelligence and intelligence in general are examined, with reader loyalties at times divided between the choices. ethical dilemmas and high-tech low-tech problems are shown, as are the lively lives of people who might have spent all their adolescence in cold-sleep and thus are emotionally six with twenty year old bodies.

4/5, stands on its own strengths if not quite as strong as RAMA III (Garden of Rama). in its own ways powerful and absorbing.