History Literature / RamaII

* DarkAndTroubledPast: Nicole failed to win a beauty pageant because of racism. After she won an Olympic medal in sprinting, she hooked up with the prince of France, who abandoned her when she became pregnant, possibly due to the same issue. She then had to move in with her father. Although he allowed her to raise Genevieve with him, Genevieve's parentage still haunts her public life. Francesca was sexually adventurous very early and some scarring past experiences - like her boyfriend 'sharing' her with other people - left her callous enough to use everyone and every thing in the present. Richard's father who abused him and his mother, due to being unable to cope after he lost his job as an engineer and suffering a case of Intelligence Equals Isolation. This lead young Richard to feel very isolated. Adultery from his girlfriend when in college pushed him over the edge, almost driving him to suicide. Only math and Shakespeare saved him. As a father in the present he is intellectually excitable but distant emotionally; and that was before he was kidnapped and probed by aliens. Other characters are not generally shown to have explicitly traumatic pasts, but Brown was the cause of one for his wife, a former [=PhD=] student whose scientific results he stole, and cosmonaut Janos is implied to have been forced to suppress homosexuality and political involvement from his youth, in order to join the astronaut academy. For the world's best and brightest they are not without their issues.

* DarkAndTroubledPast: Nicole failed to win a beauty pageant because of racism. After she won an Olympic medal in sprinting, she hooked up with the prince of France, who abandoned her when she became pregnant, possibly due to the same issue. She then had to move in with her father. Although he allowed her to raise Genevieve with him, Genevieve's parentage still haunts her public life. Francesca was sexually adventurous very early and some scarring past experiences - like her boyfriend 'sharing' her with other people - left her callous enough to use everyone and every thing in the present. Richard's father who abused him and his mother, due to being unable to cope after he lost his job as an engineer and suffering a case of Intelligence Equals Isolation. This lead young Richard to feel very isolated. Adultery from his girlfriend when in college pushed him over the edge, almost driving him to suicide. Only math and Shakespeare saved him. As a father in the present he is intellectually excitable but distant emotionally; and that was before he was kidnapped and probed by aliens. Other characters are not generally shown to have explicitly traumatic pasts, but Brown was the cause of one for his wife, a former PhD student whose scientific results he stole, and cosmonaut Janos is implied to have been forced to suppress homosexuality and political involvement from his youth, in order to join the astronaut academy. For the world's best and brightest they are not without their issues.

* AlienLunch: Humans can eat mana melons, which is both the food of the Avians and the egg of a different alien species, the Myrmicats.

* SmartPeopleBuildRobots: Wakefield, and they nearly pass for small humans. On his free time, making him also a WeekendInventor.

** And then Sabatini, [[spoiler:the de-facto BigBad]], is ranked higher than Wakefield.

** Shigeru Takagishi makes an impulsive trip across the Cylindrical Sea inside Rama to New York when he finds out that the mission may be ending prematurely. [[spoiler:The shock of encountering an octospider causes his heart condition to kill him on the spot, and [=DesJardins=] and Wakefield find his taxidermied body later on.]]
** [=DesJardins=] gets stuck in a pit in New York for days, and Wakefield goes back to find her, leading the remaining crew -- [[GeneralRipper Heilmann]], [[NiceGuy O'Toole]], [[{{Jerkass}} Brown]], [[BigBad Sabatini]], [[TheQuietOne Turgenyev]], [[TheScientist Tabori]] and [[TheStoic Yamanaka]] -- and the authorities on Earth to assume that they died as well. This apparent threat level factors into the decision to go for a NuclearOption when Rama starts heading straight at Earth.

** O'Toole, one of the Military men, is particularly well-read, mostly concerning religion as he is deeply religious, and is a gentleman. Of the three men who have access to the nuclear launch codes to detonate the spacecraft, he is the one who is reticent to use them and agonizes over his decision in the end.

* AlienFoodIsEdible[=/=]NoBiochemicalBarriers: Humans can eat mana melons, which is both the food of the Avians and the egg of a different alien species, the Myrmicats.

** Nicole was an olympic medalist. In her youth in France she almost won a beauty pageant but didn't because of racism (it is implied). She had an affair with the prince of France, then continued to raise her daughter and attend and graduate a cosmonaut academy, being chosen as life science officer on the only expedition to Rama. As a young child, she gaine mystical powers by gong through the Poro ceremony - which she gained access to by being a ChildOfTwoWorlds, as her mother is Senoufo and her father French. Her powers involved placating lions when young, and as an adult she uses them to escape a pit which would otherwise have been a death trap. Might count as BrokenAce if one counts her emotional entanglement with the prince that resulted as damage.
** Richard Wakefield communicates with the alien intelligence which designed the shi, aleitn indirectly, using his reasoning powers and coding skills, by hacking their computer interface. He builds robots which can be used for reconnaissance and which perform for entertainment, and he does this while being an affable, intelligent teammate. He doesn't reveal the majority of his flaws until the sequels; here it's content to say that he has scars from his past, which he bottled over until he tells Nicole.
** Francesca is viewed as beautiful, and, while needy (depending on her romantic relationship on Earth to an older guy / father figure), she is extremely intelligent. What sets her apart though is how ruthless she is, and pragmatic. As a reporter, no story escaped her, but on board Rama she has bigger fish to fry, like [[spoiler: collecting her share of the profits from the side deal she made to sell biots]]. Even killing one [[spoiler: and trying for another]] cosmonaut doesn't phase her; she comes off as both inhuman and efficient.
** Averted with Brown, who is actually shown so boorish that it gets in the way and Sabatini mostly takes over in [[spoiler: managing their backroom deal]]. Further, he is [[spoiler: a fraudster, having stolen credit for scientific work done by his [=PhD=] student]].
* NoBiochemicalBarriers/AlienFoodIsEdible: Humans can eat mana melons, which is both the food of the Avians and the egg of a different alien species, the Myrmicats.

** One alien has multiple life stages, including a 'sessile' stage. The sessile stage is a mesh, which interacts with an astronaut by directly sending messages through his brain, whle wrapping him in itself. t breaks down the broken members of the second life stage, the Myrmiats. Those Myrmcats are the artists /designers of the species, and live in the highest stories of their lair in the spacecraft. The Myrmicats subsist off green liquid they contan in swimming pool structures. The final life stage is an egg, which is produced by the sessile stage from nutrients reclaimed from the decommisioned Myrmicats. The eggs are looked after by Myrmicats, but also fed to a symbiotic species, the Avians. The Avians appear to be but servants of the Myrmicats, less intellegent, but they serve as defense as they are ale to manpulate the environment through their talons and formidable beaks. Their only nutrition seems to be Myrmicat eggs, and these they freely receive. The Avians communicate using what sounds to human like squawks and gibbers, made by their vocal cords - which are unlike humans' - and the Myrmicats communicate through murals when with a human. Bizarre indeed.
** The octospiders are like octopi (hence the name). In this book, the brush-foot anatomy is introduced, where they sound like brushes dragging on the ground as they move, and their orange and gold tentacles also. They communcate using high pitched sounds humans can't hear, and wide bands of colour that play across their head, one band at a time, emerging from and then disappearing into opposite sides of their eyes. In sequels one learns more and sees that their food and medicine are suitably different considering their biology and separate evolutionary pathway. They also have a social system reminiscent of a hive in that it is dominated by a need for social harmony. They biologically engineer themselves as various castes, designed for particular tasks and not others.
* ChildOfTwoWorlds: Nicole[=DesJardins=] is part Senoufo and part French. Because her parents wanted her to know both parts of her heritage she did a Poro initiation ceremony at seven. Omeh, a senoufo shaman, is her spiritual guide, and she grows up in France and attends an astronaut academy, besides participating in the Olympics.
* ColonyDrop: In the finale, [[spoiler: the spacecraft realigns is orbit so that it is in a collision course with Earth. The response on the ground is to nuke it.]]
* CoolStarship: Rama, the alien zoo. It self repairs using biots, who are made of metals we might not know about. Either end of the cylinder has large spires which glow and streak lightning before the spacecraft makes any transitions. It turns without any other motion, no mechanical parts moving, no thrusters visible. It also deploys shock absorbing nets from seemingly nowhere to coat the spaceship. Even the 'buildings', of varying forms and scattered across 'cities', are initially a mystery.
* GeekyTurnOn: During the reception for the Newton astronauts in Rama II, Nicole and Richard bond over Richard waxing on the matching plan of the gala conference room to the Rama spaceship, and on discussing dolphin (and extraterrestrial) intelligence.
* GentlemanAndAScholar: Most of the cosmonauts are well-adjusted human beings, and half the crew are scientists/engineers. The other half are military (containing still some gentlemen). One Cosmonaut is noted as reticent, one military man is an asshole, and the two journalists are unpleasant during the trip. They as a whole make up an exception to the rest of the crew.
** O'Toole, one of the Military men, is well read (mostly concerning religion - he is deeply religious), and is a gentleman. Of the three men who have access to the nuclear launch codes to detonate the spacecraft, he is the one who is reticent to use them and agonises over his decision.
* GuileHero: Nicole figured out that there was a murder and who did it, by studying the information she had on all of the cosmonauts' history, their vitals, and human behaviour in general, and being extremely observant when on board the vessel.
* HigherTechSpecies: Built the Rama vessels in the first place. The vessels have functioning domiciles for every species, complete to fit their food and physiological requirements. Each vessel has an interface through which the tenants can order materials and food, and a delivery system of chutes. The aliens themselves are only met in book 3, when one of them reveals itself to Nicole, in the form of an eagle-headed humanoid, and explains the purpose of the Rama ships. Before that, however, one can see other evidence of their presence in the robots which tend to the ship. Specialised robots perform duties from cleaning to working with the delivery systems to repairing damage the astronauts cause to the ship (unwittingly). One kind, built in the form of a crab, [[SufficientlyAdvancedAlien was not obviously non-human]] at fist glance; another is called a centipede biot, and it looks like a centipede and removes debris. They all impress the scientists and engineers, in particular Wakefield, who builds less advanced robots [[GadgeteerGenius himself]].

* IntelligenceEqualsIsolation: Richard's father was intelligent and an engineer. When he got laid off his job he never managed to find another that challenged him. At home he was Miserable, and unable to relate to his wife and son, became abusive.

** Sabatini has this as her raison d'être. She has drugged at least three people since the events began, and left a crewmate for dead. She asks questions as a reporter which her subjects would not want to answer, and which would neither enlighten an audience except as gossip, for instance asking about the father of Nicole's daughter during an interview which was about the Newton cosmonauts in their role as cosmonauts. Since Nicole was drugged at the time, she found it difficult to answer. Her cameraman puts up with her more than others, being in such close proximity. Her partner in schemes aboard the vessel is the equally charming Dr. Brown.
** Wilson acts like a jerk for most of the book, but mainly due to being NotHimself.
** Human generals decide to blow up the marvelous spaceship, a wonder of design, while bricking one potential means of escape for O'Toole, their crewman left on board.
** Finally, four of the cosmonauts engage in a backroom deal, which indirectly causes most of the trouble, as in pursuit of it's objectives two of them repeatedly endanger the lives of the other crew members.
* TheLittleDetecto: Nicole uses nanites to monitor the heart rates and chemical levels in the bloodstream of the Newton astronauts. It tells her when [[spoiler: Reggie is drugged]], though that data was tampered with and she had to recover the originals, and also tells her that Takagishi has a weak heart, which is what [[spoiler: did him in; she had warned him that his arrhythmia was flaring up, and he had gone on a night mission and had an unfortunate encounter with an octospider]].
* ManipulativeBastard: A couple. There's Brown, who is not a very pleasant person. Then there is Francesca Sabatini, whose compassion for herself and others is as deep and substantial as the non-load-bearing paper walls in a modern building.
* MileLongShip: It is necessary to get around using rovers and helicopters, and climbing down the short length of the cylinder takes hours.
* MotherNatureFatherScience: desJardins is a life science officer; guile, pleasant, and human savvy but not technologically inclined compared to her love interest, Wakefield, the engineer and roboticist. When together, he does the technical work required to stay alive and to escape New York, even though when alone she uses computers to keep track of the nanites, which are technological and are her responsibility. In contrast to her he is both boisterous and impulsive.
* {{Nanomachines}}: "Rama II" has nanites, small medicinal robots, being used to monitor vital levels for the astronauts. They remain in the bloodstream, and report things like heart rate and blood pressure constantly to a set of monitors, one for each astronaut. For each characteristic measured, each astronaut has a pre-set range of safe values, and alarms sound for the ship medic, Nicole, whenever the nanites detect that these are exceeded. Nicole consults their readings first to find out that one of the astronauts has a heart condition they had been disguising, and then later, to investigate the cause of an unexpected death on board. The reason she discovered the heart condition was that though normal heartbeat had not been maintained for that astronaut - he had a recurring valve problem-, the alarms did not trigger.

** The octospiders are introduced in this book as menacing creatures. They stuff a dead cosmonaut as taxidermy, after inadvertently killing them, and the comrades find the body. One of them chases Richard's robots, breaking one then climbing aboard a train and smashing it's windows to get to the other. They turn out to be all of evil, good and misunderstood later on. The taxidermy man stems out of curiosity.
* NotHimself: One of the cosmonauts operates on a hair trigger temper for the majority of the book. Nicole notices, but doesn't find out [[spoiler: that he's being drugged by Sabatini (who drugged Nicole herself) until she admits it.]]
* NuclearOption: The military sends aboard the mission craft nuclear explosives, and three officers who each have a code, all of which are required to trigger the bombs. The bombs are a backup plan in case the Rama ship is judged hostile. When it turns and begins to head to Earth,two of the officers deploy the bombs and enter their codes. The third, struck by pangs of conscience, deliberates. One cosmonaut had died so far due to Raman robots, and another was missing. With a third dead due to an error in a surgical robot, the crowd at home and some aboard were iffy about the intentions of the ship before it began a collision course. On the other hand the scientists who remained on board and one officer hoped and thought that the ship might not necessarily crash into Earth, perhaps diverting course at the last moment or approaching only to give a message. They feel it would be a shame to destroy a craft like this, of detailed and literally otherworldly construction, unless it was necessary and even then. Since it is an alien craft, no one knows if it is capable of acrobatic escape maneouvres which would make its approach not necessarily a threat, or conversely, if it is capable of offensives which render it unbeatable, except perhaps by a devastating surprise attack.

** Genevieve's father abandons Nicole, and so her - and he's now the King of Great Britain. Nicole's father performs an aversion, and invites Nicole to his house to live with Genevieve.
** Richard's father was abusive to Richard and his mother, leading Richard to delve into Shakespeare. Thus the Shakespearian robots Bottom, Puck, and The Bard (based on Shakespeare himself).

* SmallReferencePools: Shakespeare is Wakefield's favourite author, and when he is not building robots after Shakespearean characters, he builds one of Joan of Arc, who is as well known. Likewise, the game Takagishi and Tabori decide to play is Chess, and O'Toole, the token religious teammate, is Christian.
* TheSmartGuy: Of the cosmonauts who did the exploring on Rama and managed to stay alive, including rescuing each other at times, they all are, as they did so by relying on their with and previous knowledge.
** Richard attempted to reverse-engineer the delivery system by figuring out the commands to order any material whatsoever. He succeeded in getting a few cubes of different materials sent to them.
* SmartPeopleBuildRobots: Wakefield, and they nearly pass for small humans. On free time. Also a WeekendInventor.
* SmartPeoplePlayChess: Takagishi and Tabori play every night for one hour. Takagishi is a chess master, and allows himself to be beaten so as to encourage Tabori, who was just learning.
* StarfishLanguage: The octospiders communicate by flashing bands of light around their heads. They have an opening from which the lines originate, after which they travel around the head and re-enter it fro the opposite side. One octospider with a lisp has its colour 'run', with the bands bleeding into each other vertically a bit.
* SufficientlyAdvancedAlien: The builders of Rama are this or HigherTechSpecies.
* TamperingWithFoodAndDrink: Francesca multiple times tries to unnerve her interview subjects or throw off her coworkers like this, once leading to a [[spoiler: false diagnosis of appendicitis in the team leader for an expedition, hoping that Brown would get to go instead and fulfill a term in their backroom contract with an outside entity. Since the robot surgeon killed the man when Rama made a sudden maneouvre during surgery, her plan killed him. She covers up his murder, and might not be remorseful for it; her pan worked in that, following the leader's death, Brown did go on the sortie.]]

* TheLittleDetecto: Nicole uses nanites to monitor the heart rates and chemical levels in the bloodstream of the Newton astronauts. It tells her when [[spoiler: Reggie is drugged]], though that data was tampered with and she had to recover the originals, and also tells her that Takagishi has a weak heart, which is what [[spoiler: did him in; she had warned him that his arrhythmia was flaring up, and he had gone on a night mission and had an unfortunate encounter with an octospider]].
* TheSmartGuy: Of the cosmonauts who did the exploring on Rama and managed to stay alive, including rescuing each other at times, they all are, as they did so by relying on their with and previous knowledge.
** Richard attempted to reverse-engineer the delivery system by figuring out the commands to order any material whatsoever. He succeeded in getting a few cubes of different materials sent to them.

* HigherTechSpecies: Built the Rama vessels in the first place. The vessels have functioning domiciles for every species, complete to fit their food and physiological requirements. Each vessel has an interface through which the tenants can order materials and food, and a delivery system of chutes. The aliens themselves are only met in book 3, when one of them reveals itself to Nicole, in the form of n eagle-headed humanoid, and explains the purpose of the Rama ships. Before that, however, one can see other evidence of their presence in the robots which tend to the ship. Specialised robots perform duties from cleaning to working with the delivery systems to repairing damage the astronauts cause to the ship (unwittingly). One kind, built in the form of a crab, [[SufficientlyAdvancedAlien was not obviously non-human]] at fist glance; another is called a centipede biot, and it looks like a centipede and removes debris. They all impress the scientists and engineers, in particular Wakefield, who builds less advanced robots [[GadgeteerGenius himself]].

* TheLittleDetecto: Nicole uses nanites to monitor the heart rates and chemical levels in the bloodstream of the Newton astronauts. It tells her when [[spoiler: Reggie is drugged]], though that data was tampered with and she had to recover the originals, and also tells her that Takagishi has a weak heart, which is what [[spoiler: did him n; she had warned him that his arrhythmia was flaring up, and he had gone on a night mission and had an unfortunate encounter with an octospider]].

* IntelligenceEqualsIsolation: Richard's father was intelligent and an engineer. When he got laid off his job he never managed to find mother that challenged him. At home he was Miserable, and unable to relate to his wife and son, became abusive.

* MileLongSpaceship: It is necessary to get around using rovers and helicopters, and climbing down the short length of the cylinder takes hours.

** The three military flag officers originally have this dynamic between them, as lampshaded in a flashback of O'Toole's. He recalls that Valeriy Borzov cast the three of them as being contrasting personalities; [[GeneralRipper Admiral Heilmann]] would vote to destroy Rama immediately if it became a threat; [[NiceGuy General O'Toole]] would disagree and vote against it; and [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure Borzov]] himself would be the tie-breaker. Becomes a plot point when, after Borzov's untimely death, [[spoiler:only Heilmann and O'Toole still have unique codes to activate the nuclear devices on board; Heilmann, as predicted, is all in favour of destroying Rama before it can collide with Earth, while O'Toole dithers under the strain and eventually decides against it]].

** The octospiders are like octopuses (hence the name). In this book, the brush-foot anatomy is introduced, where they sound like brushes dragging on the ground as they move, and their orange and gold tentacles also. They communcate using high pitched sounds humans can't hear, and wide bands of colour that play across their head, one band at a time, emerging from and then disappearing into opposite sides of their eyes. In sequels one learns more and sees that their food and medicine are suitably different considering their biology and separate evolutionary pathway. They also have a social system reminiscent of a hive in that it is dominated by a need for social harmony. They biologically engineer themselves as various castes, designed for particular tasks and not others.

* GentlemanAndAScholar: Most of the cosmonauts are well-adjusted human beings, and half the crew are scientists/engineers. The other half are military (containing still some gentlemen). One Cosmonaut is noted as reticent, one military man is an asshole, and the two journalists are unpleasant during the trip. They as a whole make up an exception to the rest of the crew.
** O'Toole, one of the Military men, is well read (mostly concerning religion - he is deeply religious), and is a gentleman. Of the three men who have access to the nuclear launch codes to detonate the spacecraft, he is the one who is reticent to use them and agonises over his decision.

* {{Jerkass}}: Brown steals multiple scientific insights from others as his own. He controls conversations and missions and listens to himself only.

** Wilson acts like a jerk for most of the book.

* ManipulativeBastard: A couple. There's Brown, who is not a very pleasant person. Then there is Francesca Sabatini, whose compassion for herself and others is as deep and substantial as the non-load-bearing paper walls in a modern building.
* MileLongSpaceship: It is necessary to get around using rovers and helicopters, and climbing down the short length of the cylinder takes hours.

* NotEvilJustMisunderstood: The Avians are another alien species inhabiting the Rama spaceship. At first unhelpful and even hostile-seeming to the humans, Nicole and Richard get them to help carry them over the wide sea (in a net made of either sessile material or mana melons) after spending some time learning to communicate with them in a rudimentary way. As we learn more about Rama it becomes learn these are another sentient species like humans, kept as part of the Raman zoo.

* NuclearOption: * The military sends aboard the mission craft nuclear explosives, and three officers who each have a code, all of which are required to trigger the bombs. The bombs are a backup plan in case the Rama ship is judged hostile. When it turns and begins to head to Earth,two of the officers deploy the bombs and enter their codes. The third, struck by pangs of conscience, deliberates. One cosmonaut had died so far due to Raman robots, and another was missing. With a third dead due to an error in a surgical robot, the crowd at home and some aboard were iffy about the intentions of the ship before it began a collision course. On the other hand the scientists who remained on board and one officer hoped and thought that the ship might not necessarily crash into Earth, perhaps diverting course at the last moment or approaching only to give a message. They feel it would be a shame to destroy a craft like this, of detailed and literally otherworldly construction, unless it was necessary and even then. Since it is an alien craft, no one knows if it is capable of acrobatic escape maneouvres which would make its approach not necessarily a threat, or conversely, if it is capable of offensives which render it unbeatable, except perhaps by a devastating surprise attack.

* ParentalAbandonment: Genevieve's father abandons Nicole, and so her - and he's the Prince of France. Nicole's father performs an aversion, and invites Nicole to his house to live with Genevieve.

** Richard attempted to reverse engineer the delivery system by figuring out the commands to order any material whatsoever. He succeeded in getting a few cubes of different materials sent to them.
* WorldsSmartestMan: The smartest humans are those selected from for the astronaut body. Each astronaut has listed his or her percentile in terms of intelligence, and they are all above 99%. There are similar listings for their emotional quotients. Though Nicole doesn't put much faith in either measure, all the numbers are collected, consulted by Nicole in the wake of the chaos, and given to the reader. The measurements of psychological profiles seem to combine information from multiple points in a person's life, so that bad circumstances, causing one to be tetchy for a while, can impact them. The intelligence measures might be conducted similarly. Among the very top are Francesca Sabatini and Wakefield (two of the most prominent characters).
-->Nicole was "one in a thousand" and she was only in the middle of the dozen.
--> Wakefield's intelligence rating was truly exceptional and placed him in the supergenius category; Nicole had never before personally known someone with such high scores on the standardized tests.
** And then Sabatini [[spoiler: the big bad]] is ranked higher than Wakefield.

** Averted with Brown, who is actually shown so boorish that it gets in the way and Sabatini mostly takes over in [[spoiler: managing their backroom deal]]. Further, he is [[spoiler: a fraudster, having stolen credit for scientific work done by his PhD student]].

* TheLitteDetecto: * Nicole uses nanites to monitor the heart rates and chemical levels in the bloodstream of the Newton astronauts. It tells her when [[spoiler: Reggie is drugged]], though that data was tampered with and she had to recover the originals, and also tells her that Takagishi has a weak heart, which is what [[spoiler: did him n; she had warned him that his arrhythmia was flaring up, and he had gone on a night mission and had an unfortunate encounter with an octospider]].

** Sabatini has this as her raison d'être.