I agree with you, they were pretty awful and lost so much of the original's sense of wonder and incomprehension.

One favourite daydream of mine is to think about how the Rama aliens' second and third probes would be received. I read Rama around the same time as Eon by Greg Bear, so I've always had an affinity for spin-gravity habitats filled with unknown stuff :)

With The Expanse TV series showing us how good hard scifi can be exciting and wonderful, I'm hoping we one day get an Eon or Rama series. Rama especially would work well in a hard scifi miniseries format.

(That's actually a great thought: that many shows thought impossible a couple of decades ago will now be made. Let's just hope they're made with love and devotion like The Expanse!)

My personal theory is that Clarke's writing partners sedated and tied him inside a closet until the book was finished.

That's the only way to explain how awful some of his last books were.

Having said that, I liked Richter 10. Too bad the co-author died before they could write another one.

My heuristic is that anything co-written by Gentry Lee is not worth my time.

I even wonder why they insisted on it so much.

The final reveal was mind-numbingly bad.

IIRC, the only reason the sequels exist is that fans (or maybe his editors) pointed out out that if the Ramans "do everything in threes" then there needed to be two more parts to the story. It was never planned as such, though.