Rama II

This wasn't as good as the original, but it wasn't as bad as I had heard in a few places.A lot of the issue was that the first one was centered almost exclusively on the mystery of the ship. The characters were so very secondary that you got just enough information to keep them as individuals while reading, honestly. There wasn't really character growth or backstory--they were vehicles for the plot. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that's a bad thing when you have an interesting plot like this--in practice, I wanted to know about Rama much more than I wanted to know about the characters investigating it. I would have appreciated better-developed characters, but I didn't really *need* them. This book goes too far in the other direction. I get better developed characters. I have a solid understanding of who is who and often why they are that way. I get lots of backstory. I get so much backstory that it takes up a huge chunk of the novel and causes serious pacing issues.While I like to hear about characters and love making new book friends, I'm reading this because a strange spaceship has appeared in the sky and I want to know *why* that happened and what it is like. We don't even get to the actual ship until about a third of the way into the novel. I might be more accepting of this if it was a first novel in a series, but as the second, with an entirely new cast of people, it feels very strange. I liked the explanation of what happened to the world between novels and how things are different, though I feel like it could have been conveyed a bit more naturally than in a big info-dump. Honestly, though, I wouldn't have minded the info-dump on that so much if it wasn't followed by a bunch of character-building info-dumping as well. Give me mysterious alien secrets earlier, please! I was not super pleased with the ending, either. Without spoilers, I feel like parts of the story took a dip from sci-fi into fantasy, and while I adore me some fantasy, this felt very out of place and the ending was related to that dip. The last fourth of the book felt a little strange in general.In the end, I feel like this might be a transition for the series into something different? It wasn't terribly done, necessarily, but I'm not sure I want to make the transition with the series, so unless it gets back to the "strange alien artifact!" storyline as the main one, I'm inclined to leave the rest of the series alone.