Random trivia: Host of the video Gentry Lee is an accomplished space engineer, but he’s also 50% responsible for the collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke that produced the awful Rendezvous with Rama sequels.
Were those so awful? I remember rather enjoying them when I read them many years ago - though the last book got pretty weird, as 4th-book-in-trilogy installments tend to do.
Reaching back 30+ years into my memory... yeah, they were pretty bad. There were some cool ideas embedded into the story, and of course teenage me was desperate to see the mysteries of Rama revealed, & Lee might be a fine writer in his own right, but the collaboration with Clarke just didn't work.
The main character (Nicole?) was the worst kind of Mary-Sue, with the rest of the characters increasingly taking on the mien of cardboard cutouts flitting around her. Sex became a major theme in a way that, again, might work well with another co-author but clashes with Clarke's palette.
And IIRC, the exploration and revelation of the Ramans loses essentially all of the hard science that grounds Clarke's work generally and Rendezvous in particular and becomes woo-woo spirituality.
