Though I’d greatly enjoyed working with Gentry, when we’d finished rocking Cradle I had no plans for further collaboration — because Halley’s Comet was now dominating my life, as it had failed to dominate terrestrial skies. I realized that its next appearance, in 2061, would provide a splendid opportunity for a third Space Odyssey. (If the much-delayed Galileo does perform as hoped in 1995 and beams back megabytes of new information from the Jovian system, there may be a Final Odyssey. But I make no promises.)
By the summer of 1987, 2061: Odyssey Three was doing very nicely in the bookstores, thank you, and I was once again beginning to feel those nagging guilt pains that assail an author when he’s not Working On A Project. Suddenly, I realized that one was staring me right in the face.
Fifteen years earlier, the very last sentence of Rendezvous With Rama had read: “The Ramans do everything in threes.” Now, those words were a last-minute afterthought when I was doing the final revision. I had not — cross my heart — any idea of a sequel in mind; it just seemed the correct, open-ended way of finishing the book. (In real life, of course, no story ever ends.)
Many readers — and reviewers — jumped to the conclusion that I had planned a trilogy from the beginning. Well, I hadn’t — but now I realized it was a splendid idea. And Gentry was just the man for the job: He had all the background in celestial mechanics and space hardware to deal with the next appearance of the Ramans.
I quickly outlined a spectrum of possibilities, very much as I had done with Cradle, and in a remarkably short time Scott had sold a whole package to Bantam’s Lou Aronica. Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed would be written and delivered during the 1989-91 period.