I am an avid Asimov fan who chose Arther C Clarke's first book of this series as my entry point to his work. It was so good that I literally trawled the second hand stores in a bid to get my hands on the sequel.To put it bluntly, this book was a big disappointment for me.The biggest problem I had was that the atmosphere was completely different to the first one. I kept asking myself why it was part of the Rama series since it deals mostly with the soft issues of the scientists (ambition, religion, relationships, conflict ...) rather than the hard science[fiction] that I thoroughly enjoyed from the first book.I give this book one star because I would not recommend it to a friend. I would not recomment it to anyone interested in getting into science fiction and I would not recommend it as a showcase for the author's work.